Cookie and It’s Role In Affiliate Marketing

What is a Cookie?
Cookie is a small text file which is set in user’s browser whenever any action (impression or click) happens on creative. This is used for tracking purpose. In context of affiliate marketing, this file contains information such as affiliate ID, merchant ID, creative ID, IP address, click date, sale date for reporting purpose etc. The cookie duration, post which the cookie gets expired, is flexible and can be set by affiliate network as per the merchants consent.

Post Impression (PI) Cookie & Post Click Cookie
Post impression cookie is set whenever a banner is served from the affiliate network’s server to affiliate’s website. Its duration is normally two days as per the global norms. So, the sales/leads happening within the two days time duration will be attributed to the affiliate.

This cookie comes into picture considering the fact that user might have seen the banner on any affiliate website and might visit merchant website again through search engine or directly, later within two days.

PI cookie is undoubtedly in favour of affiliates however merchants might lose their sales happening via other channels causing them cost a single sale twice and hence lowering the effectiveness of other channel.

PI cookie is now hardly supported by any affiliate network. DGM is the only network that supports PI cookie. So, it is kind of obsolete now and merchants have also started realising the pitfalls of PI cookie.

Post click cookie is set whenever a user clicks on a banner. The duration of the click cookie is normally 30 days to 45 days. For gambling merchants it can be up to 999 days.