Affiliate Tracking Cookies are used to track one’s leads, sales, and downloads on any given website. The importance of affiliate cookies is high, should a website want to ensure that their links or banners are effectively driving customers towards desired products.
As a 6-figure affiliate marketer, I understand the importance of tracking those referrals that lead to a commission. I created a comprehensive guide to affiliate marketing here if you’d like to dive in deeper.
“39 percent of respondents in a recent study stated they believed that monetizing a website would be an area most impacted by third-party cookie deprecation at their organization.”
MarketingCharts.com
What Are Affiliate Cookies?
One of the newest marketing methods involves the use of online affiliate marketing; specifically, the use of Affiliate Tracking Cookies.
Affiliates can promote a business’s products or services by creating a referral URL that acts as a doorway or path from the customer to the online marketplace in question.
In this developing online world of marketing and sales, new avenues and methods of buying products or services are being formed all the time. For many people, adapting to an ever-changing business environment can be extremely difficult.
It can become overwhelming trying to keep tabs on effective ways of marketing and ensuring consistent sales.
How Do Cookies Work?
Cookies fire when a customer who has previously passed through an affiliate link, purchases a product or service.
This causes the owner of the affiliate link to be paid an amount of money at the time of the cookie firing.
Cookies are stored on the customer’s web browser, and therefore they provide routes and information concerning the traffic of internet users to specific online marketplaces.
Affiliate Tracking Cookies ultimately form a sort of tracking system, whereby the online marketplaces and sellers of products or services know exactly where their consumer traffic came from.
Cleared Cache
A threat to the use of Affiliate Tracking Cookies can arise when an internet user deletes or clears out their cookies from their web browser.
This would remove the links that previous cookies have made between a customer and that same customer potentially buying a product or service online.
Although some internet users may have cleared their cookies from their browser accidentally, it may be true that other users see the use of website cookies as a threat to privacy.
Cookie Disclosure
It is of the utmost importance that internet users are able to give their consent when clicking an affiliate link and be given full disclosure that their online purchasing is being monitored on a surface level.
Affiliate Tracking Cookies are stored on an internet user’s web browser when they click an affiliate link; either through clicking on a website banner, a column ad, or even through a link contained in an email newsletter.
Affiliate cookies have a vast range of time periods that they may be active for – anything from a single day to ninety days.
Ultimately, affiliate cookies require a reliable and valid form of tracking in order to assess the success of an affiliate campaign. Consumer traffic can be monitored and commissions can be made through the use of Affiliate Tracking Cookies.
Affiliate cookies work as a sort of middle-man, earning commission from online merchants by driving potential customers to specific products and services.
