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One of the ways that people are making money with Amazon is just by the cookies. I believe Amazon is a 7-day tracking cookie, so what this means is that if a us
by OmarIsmail 17y ago
One of the ways that people are making money with Amazon is just by the cookies. I believe Amazon is a 7-day tracking cookie, so what this means is that if a user clicks on your affiliate link to Amazon if that user makes a purchase from Amazon in the next 7 days, you get credit. Of course the game is "who helped me last" so it's whoever planted the Amazon cookie on that user's browser most recently will get the affiliate payment.
A potential strategy for monetization if you have a lot of return visitors is to just send them to Amazon as much as possible with your tracking cookie. It doesn't even have to be something like "buy this product I just reviewed here, now". Just a "check this random page out" and some of your users will likely make a purchase within a week without having your cookie overwritten, and boom you get a nice affiliate fee.
There is obviously a broad spectrum of how to send people to Amazon, and how to ethically get credit for that. But fundamentally it just comes down to having a user click through and get that cookie set.
eBay is a similar cookie game.
I'm not sure about other affiliate programs/networks. It'll be interesting to see if Google uses a similar cookie approach with their CPA AdSense ads. One would hope.
- billswift 17y agoThe Amazon Associate web site said 24 hours of clicking through from your site, they buy something, or they click through from another site.
- OmarIsmail 17y agoHmm then I probably got it mixed up. 1 day for Amazon, and 7 days for eBay. This was a bit before my time, but apparently eBay used to have 30 day cookie tracking! Needless to say the temptation for planting cookies was pretty damn high and resulted in some clever tricks. I think pop-unders are still used by some sites, but obviously are far less successful nowadays.
- jsonscripter 17y agoWhat's stopping a site from just having an invisible iframe link to amazon? That would refresh that cookie on every page load.