Affiliatecookie
An affiliate cookie is a special cookie that serves to assign a conversion to an affiliate.
Within affiliate marketing, an advertiser pays a fee to a publisher for generated leads and sales. The affiliate links banners and text ads with a special URL to the advertiser's website. When visitors click on these links, a cookie is placed on behalf of the affiliate network: the affiliate cookie. Once a conversion occurs, the affiliate network can use the affiliate cookie to find out through which affiliate the visitor came in.
With most networks, the affiliate cookie remains active for an extended period of time. Therefore, the first visit to the landing page and the conversion do not necessarily happen within one visit. For example, the cookie time used is 30 days.
When multiple affiliates and affiliate networks have contributed to a single conversion, usually one of them is designated as the one to be awarded the commission. We call this conversion attribution. Usually this is the first or just the last party that led a visitor to the advertiser's website.
