What % of your sales do you feel you are losing because it is because of cookies?
 

EDIT TITLE: What % of your sales do you feel you are losing because of lost cookies ?

This is for affiliate programs that operate off of tracking cookies.

Everytime I turn around I see something wanting to block or steal cookies. One way or another cookies are being lost.

- Spyware on surfers pc's stealing cookies. I bet it is more common than most think, and not zango but the stuff that hides in the background and they never know is there.
- New browsers that block cookies or make it easy for sufers to block 3rd party cookies.
- Anti virus software, I just updated Norton and it indicated I had 1 fix to make, Low Risk, Tracking Cookies with the default action set to [ FIX] and one of the permanent options to disable all cookies.

I wonder how many cookies get lost, which results in loss of sales for affiliates because of the reasons above. I believe a lot of affiliate programs still use cookies? But this is something I hardly see anyone taking about, if ever.

Discuss ?

I don't know but I'm sure its a healthy number. I'm going to be dropping all my programs that track via cookie only very shortly.

who tracks sales with just cookies?

i can't think of any

so that tells me not many sales are lost

All ccbill-only programs for starters...

maybe i am stupid to this but my understanding there is 3 ways you track sales.

1. cookie, depending on the cookie expiration date the person could come back 6 months from now through another link (that doesn't over write the cookie) and you get credit for the sale.

2. session based, doesn't matter if cookie is set or not, based on the url string if the person signs up to the site right then and there you get credit for the sale. However, if the person leaves your site and signs up later through the main .com, not through your referral url, then you do not get credit for the sale.

3. white label, doesn't matter about cookies and since the only url that is branded is your url, if they come back through the main .com and not the referral url you still get credit for the sale because the main .com is your domain.

Even if the program is session based with cookies, you still losing sales from the people who try to sign up later. Now that might not be many or nearly as many as the ones you would lose that are cookie only with no session but you still losing sales if cookies are being blocked unless you have a white label.

am i missing something ?

That is incorrect.

CCBill uses cookies, ip and another method to track sales, was reading about this a few days ago on another board :2 cents:

That is interesting, I thought all along it was just cookies. Nice to see they have another layer of tracking.