Quote:
Originally Posted by Simon
My stand on this is the same as always. A cookie should never expire... anything shorter than that, someone is taking your traffic and refusing to pay you for the surfer you originally sent to them.
If a webmaster sends someone to a tour and he gets interrupted by something before he can join but goes back later, or tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or whenever, I think the original webmaster who sent that surfer deserves a commission if he was the last affiliate who sent that surfer to the sponsor's tour.
Unless a surfers clicks another affiliate link which overwrites your cookie, there is no good reason for a cookie to expire aside from sponsor greed. The shorter the cookie life, the more the sponsor is demonstrating their greed. The sponsor is basically saying to you, "this is what I think all of your work is worth."
All traffic has some cost and therefore some value, even if only the time and work that went into building the pages or writing the posts which originally convinced the surfer to visit the tour page. Short cookies seem to say that the sponsor doesn't believe our traffic has much value to them. Which makes me think it may not be a very good idea to send our traffic to them either.
Seriously, is there any reason to use short cookies besides depriving the webmaster of an earned commission as early as possible?
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Spot on mate.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Voltar
i still think the 30 days is fine...
don't forget that on the flip side of things... the sponsor...does alot of work normally as well, getting SE listings, blogs, social networking, ect...where they link directly into themselves, and as such they may well be responsable for that signup from the guy who wasn't quite convinced a couple months before to sign up from your site...to now be sure he wants to sign up with the new info...and no new cookie since he came in directly...
so yea 30 days is a lifetime for the surfer, none of them remember what they saw a month before on some free site or gallery anyway...
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So a surfer who can't afford to join straightaway, but knows he can at the end of next month bookmarks the site after clicking the affiliate's link, goes back in 31+ days (even a year later when just going through his bookmarks and clicks to see what it is that he saved but didn't remember to go back to), signs up, and the aff gets fuck all. If you aren't making a profit as a program owner (in this case we'll use ccbill) with cookies set to the maximum, there's something very wrong. No way should you need to have the cookie length at anything less than the maximum;
1) Affiliate trust/loyalty - affiliates are partners, and should be treated as such, whatever you can give them, give them.
2) See )1.