The beauty of 9999 day cookies. Clicked in 2004, sale just confirmed!

[Matthew Wood]

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Had this sale come in this morning from Affiliate Window

Merchant: Buyagift.co.uk
Sale Amount: £120.95
Commission: £12.10
Date Clicked: 01/04/2004 20:41:57
Date of Sale: 30/07/2008 09:45:18

Shows the value to affiliates of 9999 day cookies, and that we should all factor them in when working out our true ROI.

[cclayton]

This has made me chuckle... 4 years... impressive stuff! I cant believe they are still using the same computer and have not cleaned out their cookies in 4 years.

[jess1]

This has made my day, how great is this! :tup
I wonder how offen people change their putters, also is there a way for people to migrate their cookies from an old putter to a new one..hmmm all food for thought

[tbp]

In IE7 if you go to File -> Import and Export you can export all your cookies so they can be imported into another PC. Don't know how many people would actually do this though.

I clear my cookies etc on a daily basis, can't believe someone hasn't done it in 4 years! It's suprising as well as when you get to a certain threshhold it won't accept any more unless some are deleted.

[Graham@Buyagift]

Had this sale come in this morning from Affiliate Window.

Merchant: Buyagift.co.uk
Sale Amount: £120.95
Commission: £12.10
Date Clicked: 01/04/2004 20:41:57
Date of Sale: 30/07/2008 09:45:18

Shows the value to affiliates of 9999 day cookies, and that we should all factor them in when working out our true ROI.

Excellent stuff! If i get a chance in the next week i'll do some research into the longest ever click to sale that we've recorded!

Cheers
Graham

[aotagain]

Drat that beat my best one by 2 years - that was Buyagift as well.

You must have rock cakes instead of cookies Graham !

Perhaps these are people who have been working away overseas, come back and switch on their old PC at home or something like that.

[Shane]

biggest shock is a stable windows platform for 4 years.. I'm lucky to last a year without having to bin a laptop or office machine and need to get a new one lol

makes you wonder just how booking occurs in some of the high research sectors like the travel industry over the usually defualt 30 day cookie limit.

I still think affiliates are seen as dumb mules instead of valid and respected partners by way too many merchants although hopefully that will change as the google ppc landscape keeps getting tougher.

[loquax]

Biggest shock is that they hadn't discovered 100% cashback or went looking for a non-existent voucher code.... (ooh miaoow)

Jason

[John Jupp]

Does this mean AF might be encouraged to ditch their 30 day cookie and give us all 9,999 day ones?

[hairycornflakes]

oooo thats ace!

any1 got a list of merchants that offer 9999 day cookies?

hc

[Azam.net]

Nice one Matt. Well done!

We just got payment yesterday, as we do every month, for customers referred to Equitalk about five years ago when they used to have a residual income affiliate program - we opted for the lifetime commissions rather than the CPA program via TD and another network if my memory serves me right. Still get paid about 10% of the monthly phone call charges of customers we referred.

Wish there was more residual income earners (and those that stick to their word - not the sendit.com type).

[renegade]

That is amazing, must have a been a mac user ;-)

[vhayward]

Does this mean AF might be encouraged to ditch their 30 day cookie and give us all 9,999 day ones?

I've spoken to AF about this - we run two networks, Webgains and AF and we can specify a cookie length on Webgains but not AF. Webgains is 90 days and AF is fixed at only 30.

It's a problem because it means that when I communicate with affilites, I've always got to have 2 creatives. More importantly though, with Christmas Hampers people do tend to browse around in the Autumn then buy closer to Christmas, so if a user has both a Webgains and AF cookie then the Webgains cookie will last longer and is more likely to have the sale attributed. If there's only an AF cookie then it's likely to expire before the user returns, so again the AF affiliates lose out.

There's been a lot of discussion about cookie lengths recently and I don't think there's a set length which works for everyone. The network and the merchant need to be able to set a length which is reasonable and works for their specific market. If this can't be done, the merchant runs the risk that affiliate traffic is wasted which consequently means that support for the programme wanes and everyone loses out.

Incidentally, the response from AF was that changing the cookie length is something they're looking into doing. I just hope they do it soon!

[pistol101]

It's a problem because it means that when I communicate with affilites, I've always got to have 2 creatives. More importantly though, with Christmas Hampers people do tend to browse around in the Autumn then buy closer to Christmas, so if a user has both a Webgains and AF cookie then the Webgains cookie will last longer and is more likely to have the sale attributed. If there's only an AF cookie then it's likely to expire before the user returns, so again the AF affiliates lose out.

This not actually true. The reason for having shorter cookies is that you get tracking problems due to browsers overloading with too many cookies from one source. So having shorter cookies your more likely to track the initial sales, which there are going to be more of.

Since we are no longer reliant on cookies or flash cookies we are looking at the potential to extend the tracking periods.

[Supercod]

This not actually true. The reason for having shorter cookies is that you get tracking problems due to browsers overloading with too many cookies from one source. So having shorter cookies your more likely to track the initial sales, which there are going to be more of.

That's not actually true either, as some networks can track any number of cookies and whatever length, depending on how the tracking platform is set-up, some networks can't. Paid On Results is one of the Networks that can have cookies short or long for infinite number of merchants without any risk to the browser rejecting the cookie or the cookie filling up beyond the browsers limit.

If any Affiliates fancy seeing what the oldest cookie to make a sale via their account and what day it happened via what Merchant they can simply go to Paid On Results - Your Oldest Cookie Sale type in your Paid On Results Affiliate ID and Password.