Why Cookies Are So Important to Your Affiliate Program

Good affiliates work hard to get customers for the companies they represent so they can make money online. They write articles, optimize their websites and spend money on pay per click campaigns. Even if those who follow their affiliate links don’t act right away, they deserve to get credit for the sale or lead if that person comes back at a later date. Unfortunately some affiliate programs don’t allow for that.

Using affiliate software that utilizes cookies is essential if you want to make sure that your affiliates get credit for all sales that they generate. With cookies, visitors who find the site through an affiliate’s link “belong” to that affiliate for a specified amount of time. If they come back in that time frame, the sale or lead will be credited to the affiliate who introduced them to the site in the first place.

What Are Cookies?

Cookies are text files that are sent to a visitor’s computer when they visit a website. They contain information about their usage of the site that can be used to identify them when they return. This information can also be used to customize pages to their liking based on previous usage.

In affiliate programs, cookies are used to identify which affiliate referred a site visitor. Cookies can be set to expire after a certain period of time or they can be set to never expire. As long as the cookie is present, the affiliate will get credit for future sales or leads from that person.

What If a Visitor Doesn’t Accept Cookies?

If a visitor has set their browser to reject cookies, the affiliate will not be able to get credit for future sales. Cookies are quite common and they allow users to do things like customize pages on certain websites and use certain shopping cart software. Most users do not block cookies.

Users can also delete cookies, but that doesn’t happen very often either. Most browsers limit the number of cookies that are stored on a user’s computer. If that number is exceeded, the cookie that has gone unused for the longest period of time is deleted. This eliminates the need to manually delete cookies.

Why Are Cookies Necessary?

If visitors to an affiliate’s site follow a link to a site and plan to return to it later, they will probably bookmark it so that they can come back to it directly instead of going back through the affiliate’s site. Affiliate links usually redirect to a page on your site so that bookmark will point to a page that does not identify the affiliate who referred the visitor. Without a cookie, the affiliate will not get credit for the sale or lead.

Cookies are important to affiliate programs because they allow affiliates to get credit for each sale or lead they generate. That results in more money for them, and more money means happy affiliates. An affiliate who is happy with your program will promote it actively, resulting in more sales for you and more commissions for them.