Quote:
Originally Posted by faxxaff
Reminds me of a complaint I once made to CCBill. I made a test purchase that wasn't credited to my affiliate account. They said I should clear all my cookies and run the same purchase again. Having too many cookies seems to make affiliate tracking more difficult ... another reason to not rely on them.
I think it was Shap who once posted his experiences with affiliate tracking and he believed around 20% of sales weren't tracked or something along the lines. Too me that is a huge number.
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To be honest you would loose a lot more than 20% if you DONT use cookies
There really isnt any alternative to cookies when it comes to tracking large amounts of affiliate traffic. Hence why ccbill, google etc use them
They can be persistant (so they work even if the user closes and re-opens the browser), they are pretty secure as they can only be read by the domain that sets them (so much harder to spoof than simple IP tracking or url session variables)
I cant remember where but i read somewhere the other day that google recommends a maximum of 20 cookies per domain although browsers will accept a lot more than that. I think we use 8 or 9 but that includes login authentication, affiliate tracking, search preferences etc