Cookie Life

One of the little changes I'm making to the WebWhoreBucks revenue sharing program is the cookie life. Instead of a 180 day cookie life, I've bumped it down to the default of three days.

I still think it's awesome when sponsors have an extended cookie life, but I decided to decrease ours for a number of reasons:

Traffic Exchange vs. Cookies
I'd like to exchange more traffic with our affiliates, particularly those with blogs or review sites. I found myself not wanting to link to my affiliates from my blog(s) because I'd be sending them many of our current fans and members as surfers. Then if they clicked on one of our affiliate's links BACK to our sites we'd effectively be giving away half the revenue from that customer if he joined or rejoined in the next 180 days.

I believe reviews and blog links and interviews from our affiliates can convince surfers we may already have to join; I want to be able to freely link to affiliate sites that do an awesome convincing job of promoting us -- we have a lot of fans who return to our sites for our free journals or free pics, day after day, week after week, and month after month but for some reason never make the leap to purchasing a membership. I think outside reviews or genuine recommendations can be just the thing to persuade these long-time surfers to become members.

Industry Standard
Most CCBill sponsors aren't even aware they can set the cookie life and the only big corporate sponsor I know of that advertises a long cookie life is ClickCash. I decided it's really okay if we don't outdo other sponsors when it comes to cookie life.

When I first set up WebWhoreBucks the majority of experience I had with sponsors was with ClickCash and I thought it was SO COOL that you'd get credit for sales even if the traffic you sent them didn't join until months later. Now I am balancing my desire to imitate with recognition of the strengths of our unique products: our sites convert best via thoughtful text-oriented promotion. I want to reward people who do that well with sales AND traffic, hence the shorter cookie life which will encourage me to send more traffic to affiliates who represent us well, and I sure as hell don't see iFriends sending traffic to their affiliates.

Cookies vs. Extra Data
I considered making the cookie life seven days, but in the CCBill admin it says

When the expiration value is greater than 3, no extra data will be logged to CCBill's database, so the cookie will be the only means of tracking a referred sale. If the surfer does not accept the cookie, the system will not be able to track them.

Under those circumstances I figured three days are better than seven (and maybe even better than 180).

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I was hoping that by creating a "group" in the CCBill affiliate admin I would be able to maintain the 180 day cookie life for all affiliate accounts created before today's change; unfortunately, cookie life is not an option available for setting in the "group" admin, so from here on out 3 days appears to be the limit. Of course, if I link to one of your promos, a surfer might go back to it a couple of times over a week and refresh the cookie before eventually being convinced to join. Another way to look at it is if your promo is really good, they might bookmark it too in which case the cookie life would also be irrelevant.