The Death Of Affiliate Link Tracking?

What cookies are, what information is considered personal, and why affiliate link tracking cookies oftentimes don't work these days.

I'd like to help you understand what cookies are, what information is considered personal, and why cookies oftentimes don't work these days. I'll make some suggestions about tracking solutions that work and why, and show you two affiliate programs that offer these solutions.

What is a cookie?

A "cookie" is a small file containing a string of characters that is sent to your computer when you visit a website. When you visit the website again, the cookie allows that site to recognize you according to certain information, which could be user preferences and other information. You can reset your browser preferences to refuse all cookies, indicate when a cookie is being sent, or make exceptions concerning what cookies to accept. However, some website features or services won't function properly without cookies.

What is personal information?

Personal information is recorded information about an identifiable individual. Personal information includes such things as an individual's name, address, birth date, e-mail address and phone number. Internet users have become increasingly careful about releasing their personal information online.

In the past, most merchants simply used URL's encoded with the affiliates unique ID to send a potential purchaser directly to the merchants home page. However, the primary mechanism for affiliate tracking quickly became cookies. Many of your customers associate cookies with the storing of personal information and therefore regularly delete them for security reasons. This hurts affiliate marketers despite the fact that affiliate marketing is anonymous and doesn't threaten individual privacy.

When cookies are not used, customers will usually not buy from your affiliate site on the first visit. They bookmark, comparison shop, think it over. When they return via their bookmark, they are taken directly to the merchant's site, bypassing the link with the embedded affiliate ID.

Even if they do buy on their first visit, subsequent visits and purchases are from the merchant's site, not your affiliate link. This is why cookies are used by most affiliate programs.

Why Cookies Don't Always Work

1. Your customer accesses the internet via numerous computers and browsers.

2. Your customer regularly deletes all cookies from their browser, for security purposes regarding personal information.

3. If your customer revisits the website by clicking on another affiliate's link, you lose your commission because it goes to the most recently clicked link.

4. Merchant greed - the merchant has control of the life of your cookie, and knows quite well that a shorter life means less commissions he needs to pay out, providing him with sales and customers earned from the hard work of affiliates but effectively ripping them off.

5. Lifetime cookies rarely last that long. Maybe for one of the reasons I've already mentioned, or maybe because your customer has a new computer or replaces the hard drive and loses all his cookies. Or maybe your customer will do a clean install of his operating system. Same result, no more cookies.

6. Some customers will remove your affiliate ID from a URL before they visit the site. Link cloaking will fix this problem.

What Tracking Systems Work

Some affiliate programs store the referring affiliate's ID in the purchaser's information in their customer database. That way, no matter how, when, or where the customer makes an additional purchase the affiliate will get a commission. These are one kind of program you want to especially keep an eye out for. SiteSell is an example of this type.

Another type to keep an eye out for are affiliate programs that use predesigned CGI websites where each affiliate receives a unique url. These sites are generated from a template each time the URL is requested and usually also have all the internal links encoded with the affiliate ID. Publisher-For-You is an example of this sort of program.

These pages offer the simplicity of the original affiliate model of URL's encoded with the affiliates unique ID that are promoted in order to send the customer to the merchant's site. But it's your unique affiliate URL that they'll bookmark, there is no stripping out of the affiliate ID. The bookmark will return the customer to your website, not the merchant's, and the commission won't be lost.

Affiliate link tracking may seem like a small and inconsequential thing, but if you stop and think about it, it is maybe the most important part of your sales website. If you can't get the commissions you deserve, what's the point?

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