Friday, August 11, 2006

No Cookies for Decommissioned Junction

I've been dumping affiliate programs lately because of the abysmal rate of cookie tracking and ever decreasing affiliate income vs. the PPC steady income rate.

This isn't terribly accurate as my script doesn't know if a cookie was accepted until the second page view. However, out of 3489 visitors in a sample I just took, that looked at 2 or more pages, the cookies were disabled by 22% of the returning visitors.

5926 Visitors
3489 Visitors > 1 Page View
2710 Cookies Enabled
779 Cookies Rejected
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that 22% of disabled cookies make affiliate programs relatively unattractive as almost 1/4 of the returning visitors wouldn't give me credit for anything they buy.

Out of the total visitors it's only 13%, but we don't know how many of the 2437 visitors that only viewed a single page had cookies enabled, but my suspicion is it's closer to 20%.

Taking into account that these numbers are POST bot filtering, so all of the bots that were blocked or banned didn't get included, this leads to two possible conclusions:

1) a lot more people aren't accepting cookies than previously thought or
2) there's a lot more low impact stealth bot activity than even I suspected.

Which is the right answer?

I'm sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Now thats scary!
What sort of market sector are you getting? Broad or geeky?
I can believe that geeks are at 20% non-cookied, but I have trouble with the concept that Joe and Mary Shopper are turning them off - they offer too much *convenience* for them!

IncrediBILL said...

Very low geek, nothing technical.

Remember, we're talking just returning visitors for 2 pages or more and there's a lot that bounce off the page.

Heck, even my mom and brother-in-law has their browsers set to ask to use cookied per site, real trippy.

I let cookies in all the time, I can't be bothered with it.

Anonymous said...

I accept cookies automatically, but my browsers delete all cookies @exit.

Anonymous said...

Definitely scary then! :(
Thanks for the info.

... and I can't think of any other way for the aff programs to give extended credit :(

Anonymous said...

I suppose it really depends on if they really want to keep affiliates, most affiliate programs like ours (moreniche.com) track by more than cookie tracking because we understand how important affiliate tracking is.

Andy