Overwriting affiliate cookies - Good, Bad, Don't care?
 

Program X runs affiliate revshare with 30-day cookie.

Sunday, 2 Jan: Affiliate A sends surfer 1 to program X,surfer surfs tour, likes but only bookmarks, then leaves

Thursday, 6 Jan: Affiliate B sends surfer 1 to program X, sees tour remembers it well, leaves

Saturday 29 Jan: Surfer 1 gets no nookie that night and needs to blow load, so comes back to tour of Program X through his bookmark and signs up.

If affiliate programs simply set cookie if refid is present in the URL, then aff B wins. If programs only set cookie if no valid cookie is present, aff A wins.

Which affiliate do you say should get the revshare and why?

This is not a loaded question! Just that this has come up a few times in tour design in my lifetime and the outcome has always been kind of 50/50 in implementation....

no one gets the revshare cause it gets shaved

A sent it there; A's cookie has not expired.

in that scenario i don't think it matters much - if Affiliate A gets the sale over Affiliate B hard to feel sorry for Affiliate B since the surfer used a bookmark from Affiliate A, seems a little unfair to Affiliate B but that's the way the cookie crumbles

Well, OK, let's put it another way -

Jan 2: Affiliate A sends surfer 1, surfer leaves
Jan 9: Affiliate B sends surfer 1, surfer 1 signs up

Working on cookies, Affiliate A would get the signup as his cookie hasn't expired, even though it was surfer B who sent the member.

Affiliate B is the obvious choice since he set the last cookie before the sale. We can speculate all we want on what affiliate A may have done to get the member to join, but we don't know. We have to assume that affiliate B closed the sale.


edit: If the rules are that the first affiliate to refer a click gets a 30 cookie that can't be written over, then A should get the sale. Although I think splitting the sale in some manner between A and B could be interesting.

I've always argued/opted for the a mix of cookies and sessions - if in the current session there's a refcode, that affiliate gets credit (deals with bookmarks and the above). If not, then the cookie prevails. Which cookie... I'd argue for the first ie if cookie is present, don't overwrite.

It's an interesting conundrum and lots of people play it differently without the affiliate even knowing

If there is no referring affiliate in the current session, then the last cookied affiliate should absolutely get the sale.

A scammy situation arises when the affiliate program finds a way to overwrite that affiliate's cookie with their in-house cookie. For instance, sending affiliate links to page 1 of the tour and then forcing returning typeins to go through a warning page where the Enter button is loaded with the in-house cookie.