Are Your Affiliates Sales Being Tracked Correctly? (continued, part 2)
There are however, several very
good programs that do provide this benefit for affiliates, and they have been very highly
rated at ClickQuick because of it. Perhaps the leader in this area is the PulseTV affiliate program, which allows affiliates to earn
commissions for life on customers they refer. Another program, just recently reviewed, is Astrology.Net which pays follow-up commissions for 6
months after the initial purchase. Many other programs also offer residual income possibilities to their affiliates
since their service generally includes a monthly fee to customers, of which the affiliate
receives a percentage.
Multi-Session Affiliate Programs
At the next stage in the food
chain are those programs that use cookies (and occasionally other methods) to track
visitors to their site, and the affiliate that referred them. The cookie stores this
information on the visitor's computer, and if they return later to make a purchase, the
affiliate will still receive credit.
This does not however generally
mean that the affiliate receives follow-up commissions after the initial purchase. Rather
the cookie is set to give credit for visitors that don't purchase during the initial
referral, but come back at a later time or date to complete the sale.
This is important since
statistics have shown that most people don't purchase on an initial visit to a site, but
rather evaluate the product and conduct research at other sites before returning. I will
coin these 'Multi-Session Affiliate Programs' since visitors and the referring affiliate
are tracked through multiple browsing sessions.
However, one obvious limitation
of cookies is that many surfers choose to turn cookies off, meaning that the cookie will
never be set on their computer. This generally means that the referring affiliate will not
be recorded, and if the visitor does not purchase through the initial link, the sale will
be lost. A small portion of web surfers even actively delete cookies that have been
placed, or use software to automate this process. Additionally, since cookies are
generally set to expire 30 days to 6 months after the initial visit (depending on the
merchant's preference), referred sales can not be guaranteed over long periods of time.
Luckily, some affiliate programs
simply use cookies as one method of tracking affiliate referrals. Other methods include IP
address and referring URL capture. Multi-session affiliate programs have been increasing
in number significantly over the past year or so as technologies improve and as more
merchants add more sophisticated tracking methods as a benefit for affiliates (and
competitive advantage for themselves).
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