Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

This is a strange one.  As I’ve mentioned a few times, we (Altogether Digital) are soft-launching our new affiliate network in a few weeks time and as part of this I had a query for the IT director at the provider we are using.

To give you a bit of background, we decided to use a new ASP based solution (NOT directtrack!) after weighing up a number of different ideas.

Anyhow - back to my point.  I spoke to the IT Director about some additional functionality that we wanted to add and as part of this it came out that this provider (who currently run a medium sized US network) work on a first-in cookie basis.

In other words, if a visitor visits a merchant via Affiliate A and decides not to buy, but goes back and purchases something after visiting Affiliate B’s site/ad (within the cookie period) then Affiliate A get the commission, even if they did not generate the sale.

This is the opposite to how all the networks in the UK tend to work and I did have to pinch myself and confirm that I was not mistaking things, in fact, I asked Pete at Affiliate Future to confirm that they worked on the last man in basis and was greated with the following reply:

Pete says: how long you been in affiliate marketing..lol

So maybe it’s a geographic thing, I tell myself.   I get back in contact with the software provider and tell them that as things stand we would not want to launch with the tracking set that way - we certainly don’t want to encourage cookie stuffing after all.  Luckily all is fine and they are able to change the tracking method for our setup but I kept wondering if it was a US thing.

I asked Shawn Collins to clarify:

Shawn says:  that’s odd - LinkShare, CJ, Performics, Shareasale, etc - all pay on last referrer - I don’t beleive there is even an option to go the other way

Shawn says: that’s really such a big risk being invited - I like how MYAP does it - they let you decide by afifliate with last referrer getting paid as the default. I set it as first referrer for some adware affiliates back in 2002 when we were debating whether they were cheating

Shawn says: so they would only get commission if they were the first and only referrer, as I expected, their numbers dropped big time

So it seems it’s not a location thing but Shawn does raise a good point about Spyware, something that due to the efforts of Clarke, Jess and a number of others has never been too much of an issue in the UK (unlike the US where it’s been a long term plague).

I’m really trying to think of other reasons for a network to work this way - the only other slight benefit I could see (if you can even call it a benefit) is that it may make things harder for brand name bidders but I really would be interested in hearing the views of affiliates, merchants and networks alike to if this kind of policy would make much of a difference to them.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Advice, Technology, Affiliates . 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.