How Affiliate Cookies Work
One of the first questions new affiliates have is how do they know they are getting credit for sales? This brings up the question of how affiliate cookies work.
Let’s consider a typical scenario for an affiliate. They build a site and put affiliate links on it. The affiliate then does some marketing work and attracts traffic to the site. That traffic clicks through to the affiliate sponsor site. A couple of sales happen, but most visitors leave the site without buying. A week later, some of those visitors return to the sponsor site and make a purchase. A reputable affiliate program will credit these subsequent sales to the affiliate because of how cookies work.
Cookies are tiny bits of code. When a person visits a site, the cookies work by attaching themselves to the computer in question. They then track where and what the user of the computer is doing for a certain number of days. With affiliate programs, this is usually 30 days, but can be as long as a couple of years.
Affiliate cookies work by tracking the users conduct in relation to certain actions. If the user comes to the sponsor site through an affiliate link, the affiliate program notes a relationship between the cookie and the affiliate. If the person then returns and buys within the prescribed time, the database will acknowledge as much and credit the sale to the affiliate. This is how cookies work in a nutshell.
Don’t rely too much on cookies as an affiliate. You want to get the sale the first time. Why? Well, more and more people now configure their browsers to not accept cookies. That means you will not receive the credit for a sale for any of these people when they come back to the sponsor site and make the sale. As you can imagine, the sponsor can also play some sneaky games with the cookies in relation to what you get credited with and what you don’t, so be careful.
The process of how affiliate cookies work is pretty simple. That being said, you should not rely on them excessively as an affiliate. Try to get the sale the first time you send traffic through. If you don’t, you risk the possibility of losing credit for what you are owed down the line.