Lots of adult affiliate programs use cookies to track your affiliate code in addition to or instead of using them in the urls. This way if a surfer comes back to the sponsor site at a later date to make a purchase and his cookie still has your affiliate code, you will get credit for the sale.

However, the expiration date of these cookies is set by each adult affiliate program, and many set it short so that when these ‘late buyers’ come back to purchase, there is no cookie with your affiliate code, and they get to keep the entire amount of the sale without sharing any with you, even though you originally sent the buyer in the first place.

The question is, what cookie expiration is acceptable to you? Many affiliates feel cookies should be ‘for life’, but many adult affiliate programs don’t agree, or just accept the default cookie expiration length set by their 3rd party billing software (such as CCbill). However, adult affiliates seem to agree that anything less than 7 days is unfair.

The best but slowest way to check cookie expiration times is to clear your cookie cache, visit your adult affiliate link to get a fresh cookie, and then view the cookie details for the expire time.

For Firefox, you can select Tools->Options->Privacy->’remove individual cookies’ to search.
For Internet Explorer, you can select Tools->Internet Options->Browsing history, Settings->View Files to search.
For Chrome, you can select Options->Under the Hood->Content settings->Cookies->Show cookies to search.

Luckily, someone has already done a lot of this grunt work for us. Sign Bucks Daily has a page of low cookie time CCbill programs. See if any of your adult sponsors are on it.

I also found this CCbill cookie checker tool.