Afflilate cookies overwriting each other ?

Hi all,

This may seem like a simple question, and hopefully it is. Yesterday I was thinking :

Let's say that I am running an adwords campaign (or just receiving clicks on an affiliate link through my website) ...

This means that a cookie is written on the user end.

Now, let's say that this user, who's shopping around for a certain product, happens to click on the affiliate link of one of my competitors, who's selling exactly the same product.

However, the user clicked my competitor's link AFTER my own link.

Does this mean that MY cookie is OVERWRITTEN by the competitor's cookie ? Meaning that the sale will go to the competitor, even though the user has maybe gotten most useful information from MY landing pages ?

-FOP-

I don't know about Adwords, but it is the case for many affiliations where the cookie of the last visited affiliate overwrite the previous one.

Depends on how the merchant have their tracking set up, most companies use last click tracking so yes you would lose out.

It also depends which way you look at it because if they didn't convert with you it was for a reason and if they didn't remember your site to come back to then that's also for a reason.

Yes, nearly every program will award the commission to the very last click. It's one of the reasons that so many affiliates hate the coupon affiliates - you can drive the sale and get them to the last step, then they'll run off to Google when they see the promotional code box, and the cookie of the coupon site will overwrite yours.