What does cookie duration mean?
Cookie duration is a key concept in affiliate marketing because it defines how long an affiliate can earn a commission after referring a visitor to your store. In simple terms, it determines how long Affiliatly remembers which affiliate sent a potential customer to your website.
By default, Affiliatly uses a cookie duration of 7 days. This means that when a visitor clicks on an affiliate’s referral link, a tracking cookie is stored in the visitor’s browser for seven days. If the visitor makes a purchase within that time frame, the order is automatically linked to the referring affiliate and the commission is credited accordingly.
Once the cookie duration expires, the tracking relationship ends. If the same visitor completes a purchase after the cookie has expired, the order will no longer be associated with the affiliate who originally referred them. This ensures that commissions are only assigned within the time window you define for your affiliate program.
Why cookie duration matters
Choosing the right cookie duration can have a significant impact on the performance of your affiliate program. A longer cookie duration gives affiliates more incentive to promote your products, especially if your customers tend to take more time before making a purchase. A shorter cookie duration can be useful for businesses with faster buying cycles or for campaigns where immediate conversions are expected.
Affiliatly gives you full control over this setting, allowing you to align your tracking rules with your business model and sales process.
How to change the cookie duration in Affiliatly
You can easily adjust the default cookie duration by going to Settings > Tracking > Tracking methods and clicking the Settings button next to Link tracking. From there, you can set the cookie duration anywhere between 1 and 365 days, depending on your preferences.
In addition to a global setting, Affiliatly also allows you to define cookie durations individually for each affiliate. This is useful if you want to reward certain partners with longer tracking periods based on their performance, partnership level, or promotional methods.
💡 You can also set the cookie duration individually for each affiliate. If you want to overwrite individually set cookie durations with the global setting check the box Change for all affiliates underneath the field..Flexible tracking built for growing programs
With Affiliatly, managing cookie duration is straightforward and flexible. Whether you are running a small affiliate program or scaling a larger one, these controls help you balance fairness, motivation, and accurate commission tracking. By setting the right cookie duration, you create clear rules for affiliates while ensuring that conversions are tracked reliably and transparently.