10th February 2009

Request For Merchants To Increase Their Cookie Periods – You Don’t Get Unless You Ask

posted in Affiliate Marketing |
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Where is it written (graved) within the 10 commandments on the two tablets of granite & stone that Moses brought down from affiliate mountain “thy cookie shalth only be 30 days”.

(Please excuse my lack of knowledge / ignorance on biblical history)

The wrong message is being sent, perhaps from outset even, rather than bending over a barrel & accepting the cookie period terms “any” merchant desires or badly recommended by “any” network, perhaps “all” networks should be actively persuading their merchants (there is no time like the present) to increase cookie periods. Nip it in the bud.

Perhaps 365 days should delineated as standard !

It was warned in an earlier blog entry to be wary of merchants squeezing the cheese from affiliates during a difficult finanacial climate that gradually more & more will try to reduce cookie periods to increase the merchants margins.

Two of the several oldest excuses given are along the lines of :

“These investigations have shown that the majority of transactions occur within 30 days of the original click time (with the vast proportion occurring within 3 days of the click).”

Poppycock … If so insignificant, why bother reducing the cookie period?!

“We have moved their cookie period in line with major competitors in the sector “

Poppycock … Well this doesn’t make the merchant stand out from the crowd, but more just one of the mindless sheep.

Moving Forward:

Perhaps there should be a a concerted campaign of a short period of time, where “all” networks make a real concerted effort, not just a token one, to ask “all” their merchants to consider & action the increase their cookie periods ideally 365 days or more, but at least some decent improvement. Some merchants like Buyagift already have a 9999 day cookie. Even affiliates could at least ask / persuade / educate merchants they deal with.

I think this is one sign which shows good intent from a merchant in how much they value the affiliate channel.

You don’t get unless you ask ! Even if only “two” out of “ten”say YES , that’s still a whopping 20% increase.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 10:22 AM and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 4 responses to “Request For Merchants To Increase Their Cookie Periods – You Don’t Get Unless You Ask”

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  1. 1 On February 10th, 2009, Nadeem - Azam Marketing said:

    Completey agree with you Paul!

    When merchants reduce the cookie period, they often justify it by saying it won’t affect affiliates’ incomes. Well, if it won’t affect affiliates’ incomes why expend resource to reduce it?!

    Whenever Azam Marketing takes over or launches a program, we do everything we can to ensure affiliates are rewarded fairly, even if means lower fees for us, and we encourage advertisers to elongate the cookie period. Many of our programs have a 120 day cookie (Froggybank on CJ, Ironmongery Direct and Trust William on WG etc. etc.) and with our UK white-label cashback service and US telecoms programs ( http://www.azam.net/us/telecom )there is a lifetime revenue share. We appreciate this is not always possible in all scenarios, but affiliates need to be seen as valued partners who deserve fair remuneration.

  2. 2 On February 11th, 2009, Graham Keen said:

    As you know I don’t need convincing on this matter – in fact Matt Wood Twittered about this – on the 9th Feb he had two sales from Buyagift where the click was made in 2004!

    An interesting point – certainly with Affiliate Window – is that you can set individual cookie periods for affiliates, so maybe where an affiliate feels particularly put out by the cookie period, they could negotiaite a longer one.

    Graham

  3. 3 On February 11th, 2009, Kevin Edwards said:

    Without getting into the rights and wrongs of individual merchants’ decisions I’m completely baffled as to why networks should be encouraging their merchants to increase their cookie periods.

    30 days has always been standard (you’ll say, why should we accept that as a standard, well why should we accept 365 days or anything else you mention – it’s all arbitrary)

    There is no groundswell to see that changed.

    I have less of an issue with merchants reducing their cookie to 30 days than I do with merchants who choose to cut into that. That smacks of opportunism and trimming of commissions by the backdoor to me.

  4. 4 On June 15th, 2009, Joe said:

    About 99% of all my sales come from Amazon which the rest being made up from a few other merchants on other networks.

    I’d love 30 days with Amazon but unfortunately we only get 24 hours.

    I’ve not had much luck with getting sales from any other merchants yet.

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