Cookies.. and a can of worms
That’s precisely what Jeff Molander opened up on Revenews. There’s been quite some discussion since he posted the piece a couple of days ago — pretty useful, in fact. Brook Schaaf also had some interesting comments on the issue, which to summarize is this: when does (or should) an affiliate really get credit (read commissions) for a sale? The basis of Jeff’s post is a study by Michael Brucker that details how affiliate cookies are tracked/overwritten as a result of clickthroughs from paid search results/ organic search results, which ultimately dicates who gets the money.
It is only natural to expect affiliates to be very touchy about their cookies being overwritten- it hurts us directly, and so the discussion subtly brought forth big picture questions such as what is fair, what is right etc. etc.
If we were to take a very close look at the models that Brucker has come up with, I think affiliates are getting a fair deal, which makes business sense. I say this as an affiliate, knowing fully well that I may be losing money to a competing affiliate despite having initially driven traffic to a merchant web site– and that too after spending money on generating that traffic. (My comment is purely related to the Brucker models– as there may be other areas where I feel affiliates deserve better from merchants). Also, I’d have issues with the loss of commission if I were operating on a cost per lead (visitor to the website) or cost per click basis for the merchant, but here we are talking about a cost per sale or cost per acquisition . Being in the pay-for-results business, and if that desired outcome is a sale, I have to acknowledge and accept that the last person who got the customer through the door deserves the commission cheque.
I’m sure this is not the last of the cookie issue — there will be more complicated marketing hypotheses and a whole range of techicalities related to cookie tracking/analytics; but let’s combine it with a bit of simple common sense and objectivity.
