3 {{ upvoteCount | shortNum }}
3 {{ upvoteCount | shortNum }}

Affiliate credit - first vs most recent cookied/opted in?

by pharris
2 replies
Maybe you can help with this - it is important when it comes to affiliates.

Some affiliate programs, like Amazon's I think, give affiliates credit for the most-recent cookied lead that buys.

So if "harry" clicks on affiliate A's link to product A on monday, and harry doesn't buy.. affiliate A doesn't get credit for a sale since he didn't buy. So far so good. And let's say that two weeks later "harry" clicks on affiliate B's link to product A instead, and This time he does buy -- affiliate B gets the commission. That seems fine, that's how I like it.

QUESTION about should first-cookied lead vs most-recent get credit?

But it appears there's many affiliate programs that "cookie/stamp/credit the original lead" such that if say affiliate A sent out a bunch of product launching emails 8 months ago, that affiliate A gets credit for that email names' purchases for a year or two following Whoever sent the email, that originally generated the opt-in (regardless of if a subsequent affiliate's email link is the one that actually generates the sale from that lead).

So let's say affiliate A in this program sent out an email blast to a namesqueeze page back in January. And let's say "John" didn't buy, but did opt in to that initial list. Now John is "stamped" as affiliate A's lead, and affiliate A gets any commissions from John's purchases... EVEN if say affiliate B sends an email blast this week and John now buys, from the link in affiliate B's email... affiliate A still gets the credit. That doesn't seem right, but it's how some of the programs are set up. I won't mention names, but one very popular well known affiliate email type system uses this approach I think.

Any ideas on how that should work? Many marketers have leads that are on multiple lists. It seems that the most-recent click affiliate should get credit for the sale, because it may have been their endorsement or recommendation (or bonus) that created the sale, and tipped the purchaser over into buying... not the original affiliate who happened to have the lead cookied months ago, that gets credit.

thank you for any ideas!
#affiliate #cookied or opted #credit #recent
  • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
    Banned
    Originally Posted by pharris View Post

    Any ideas on how that should work?
    Neither cookie-based method is perfect, and both will lead to many anomalies and iniquities.

    All the discussions/polls about the Clickbank sales process that I've ever seen have suggested that the overwhelming preponderance of opinion is in favour of their current system ("most recent cookie gets the sale"). The main problem with that system, it seems to me, is that it plays right into the hands of vendors who want to capture their affiliates' leads with an opt-in on the sales page and then send them autoresponder email including the hoplink from their own affiliate account. Many vendors do this with a proportion of their leads, because they have a great financial incentive to do so, of course (at 75% commission, every sale they can make for themselves is worth 4 affiliate sales!), it's terribly difficult for affiliates to prove and Clickbank (probably rightly, I think) is unable and unwilling to take any interest in or action over this all-too-common scenario. It's avoidable by not promoting products with a mandatory opt-in, of course, or asking the vendor to provide a version of the sales page without the opt-in (as many now do).

    On the other hand, if you have a "first cookie gets the sale" system, you have more technical problems/difficulties, and occasional situations in which a thoroughly incompetent or even a now-inactive affiliate has "got their cookie in first", to the detriment of the subsequent highly professional affiliate with an appropriately targeted sales funnel, autoresponder series and all the rest of it.

    You can't please everyone, all the time.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[2615300].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author pharris
      Thanks Alexa, you make good points.

      My concern is, I am in an industry in which me and my competitors all have a lot of leads overlap; many of our subscribers are on multiple lists (like many niches)... so I do not want to promote something new from someone to my list if say 30-40% of the sales that are generated give an affiliate commission to a competitor of mine, just because that lead opted in from a namesqueeze they sent out many months ago, which is how many (non cb) aff programs seem to be set up.
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[2615363].message }}

Trending Topics