Internet Marketing Blog

The Cookie Monster And Affiliate Marketing

Posted by peter on May 30, 2009 |

Affiliate marketing is by far the easiest way to start making money on the internet. The benefits are just enourmous, no product, no customer service, no after-sale support, no research costs and so on. You make a sale, earn a cut (often up to 75% of the product price) and focus on making more sales. You don’t get sidetracked with questions and everything else involved with selling your own product.

Infact, affiliate marketing is so powerful, I’d say that all the major internet marketers that you know and love (well, at least know) are doing it. Everytime you get one of their emails in your inbox, chances are they are trying to sell you one of their buddy’s products.

While affiliate marketing can be lucrative if it is done correctly, either through article marketing, email marketing or setting up numerous review sites, there are some people that try and take a short cut and use unethical methods to earn affiliate commissions.

One such method is called Cookie Stuffing. Since nearly all the affiliate programs are based on cookies (cookies are little bits of information that is held on the users computer and gives a website some details about them, in this case, it tells the website who referred the user and when) to track affiliate sales, controlling the adding of cookies to people that visit your site could be very lucrative.

Consider this scenario:

You set up a review website, which is indepth and contains a great amount of information on the products being reviewed. You spent hundreds of dollars buying and testing the products to give the best review possible. You spend time and effort doing SEO to get it to the top of the search engines.

You are now getting plenty of traffic, but not converting very well. What could be the problem? Well, it could be one of dozens, but perhaps people like to see more than one review so that they know your review isn’t just a one off, so they click the back button and read the next review available on the site below you. Or maybe they already know the website URL and are just doing some research to get a feeling of what others are saying about the product. They then go back to the original website without clicking on your affiliate link - even though you spent a lot of time trying to help these people, you won’t get any credit.

This is where cookie stuffing comes in.

There are many methods you can use to stuff cookies on to someones computer, but I’m not going to go in to details about that now - Google will give you more than enough resources for this.

What it does is secretly place a cookie on the visitors computer, they don’t even have to click on your affiliate link. Now, regardless of whether they leave your site, your cookie is ’set’ and when they buy, you are virtually guaranteed to get the commission.

Is it ethical? I personally don’t think so, but many marketers feel otherwise and think it is quite legitimate to get credit for the time and effort put in to their review sites.

But a word of warning…

Cookie stuffing is against the terms of virtually every single network (for obvious reasons, they will be unnecessarily paying out commissions, which hurts their bottom line), if they catch you doing it they will immediately delete your account and you will lose any commissions that you may have made.