BetfairX - Detailed Guide To Clearing and Viewing Cookies

This guide is a detailed / technical guide explaining how to actually view the cookies you have installed on your machine so that you can be sure that a registration to a gaming site via a particular affiliate actually tracks correctly. It is written specifically for users who have tried once to register for a BetfairX account but have failed to have the registration track correctly, and who now need to ensure that their cookies are correctly cleared and that the cookies are written correctly before registering again.

For a quick guide to just clearing cookies click here - otherwise read on for the full article on how to inspect / view your cookies after clearing them first.

Use a Different Web Browser To Do This!
This guide is written under the assumption that your primary web browser is Firefox and that you want to delete/check your cookies in Internet Explorer. The reason for this is that by using a different web browser than your normal web browser, you can clear ALL your cookies in Internet Explorer without worrying about losing any important cookies for sites you visit regularly.

If you usually use Internet Explorer as your main browser and you want to follow this guide, unfortunately you will lose all your cookies in the process. This is not a big deal, cookies are by their nature a temporary 'thing', it just means that you will have to probably re-login again to sites you use regularly and generally lose any 'stateful' session data for the sites for which you deleted the cookies.

Ensure that your cookies are cleared correctly
Part 1 - Delete browser cookies/history.
First delete all your browsing history and cookies. You shouldn't really need to delete everything but if it's not your main browser it won't hurt to delete everything anyway:

1. Open Internet Explorer and press 'ctrl-shift-delete' to open up the 'Delete Browser History' dialog box (or go 'Tools > Internet Options > General > Delete... (under 'Browsing History').
2. In the 'Delete Browsing History' dialog box, check/'tick' all the boxes apart from the 'Preserve Favourites' and click 'Delete'.

Strictly speaking you only want to delete cookies, but since we're in a 'virgin' browser it shouldn't matter anyway that we're deleting everything and it always helps to start from a clean environment. Deleting everything shouldn't take too long to delete everything if you don't use it regularly.

Part 2 - Open up the cookies folder in Windows Explorer
Next, open up the cookies folder in Windows explorer. This will allow you to check that the cookie files are correct after you browse to the Betfair site using the BetfairX link:

1. Press 'Windows+E' to open up Windows Explorer (or goto Start menu, type in 'Windows Explorer' and select it from the start menu).
2. Goto 'Tools > Folder Options' in the Windows Explorer menu (if you can't see the menu in Windows Explorer, just press 'Alt' and it should 'pop up' the menu I think?).
3. In the 'Folder Options' dialog box, goto the 'View' tab. Click the radio button next to 'Show hidden files, folders, and drives' and untick/uncheck the check box next to 'Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)'. (You want to display all hidden files and NOT hide the operating system files). Click OK when done.
4. In Windows Explorer, browse to the directory %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp\Cookies (goto Explorer, press 'alt-d' to focus on the address bar and enter in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp\Cookies).

Cookie files are stored in a plain text file in this directory with the file extension '.txt' (see note below though for IE9). Confirm there are no cookie files listed in that directory - there should be no cookie files in there at all (there might be one or two files in there like desktop.ini and index.dat but you can ignore those).

Part 3 - Browse to Betfair via the BetfairX affiliate link
Now we can go on to 'spawn' the cookie - by visiting an affiliate link (the BetfairX link in this case), a cookie file will be placed on your computer:

1. In Internet Explorer, carefully(!) open the following URL:
   
   http://ads.betfair.com/redirect.aspx?pid=12923&bid=4110
   
   (carefully copy and paste it from here into Internet Explorer's address bar or drag and drop the link ^ into Internet Explorer's window).
   
   Do NOT register until you have followed the step below!

Part 4 - Check the Cookie
Finally go on to inspect/view the cookie and check that it is 'correct':

1. Go back to Windows Explorer and check the Cookie folder you browsed to in Step 2 above. There should now be a number of files in there ending in .txt - these are the cookies that have just been placed on your hard drive after browsing to the Betfair page above.
2. Open the cookie file(s) in a text editor and search for a line starting with 'TrackingTags' - check the line underneath this and make sure it contains '16904' (it should read something like 'clkID=16904_00EC251E1BA24AB5A3838554742856&rfr=16904&ttp=111').

NOTE:
Unfortunately the number of cookie files that are placed when you browse the Betfair site is quite large - over a dozen at the time of writing. Also it is not obvious which file contains which cookies so you need to search all the cookie files to find the right now.

Some editors can make it easy to search all the files at once, if you're stuck though feel free to send them to me at betfairx@thegamblingtimes.com and I will check them for you.

Part 5 - Register the account / deposit
IMPORTANT: DON'T DO THIS STEP UNTIL YOU HAVE CONFIRMED THE COOKIE IS CORRECT!

Once you've checked the cookies / confirmed the TrackingTag cookie is correct - ie it contains '16904' as explained in the section above - you can be fairly sure that your registration will track correctly under that affiliate's ID. I say 'fairly sure' here because it is still possible that there is something else at Betfair's side that will stop the registration tracking - but at least you know you've done all you can to make sure it tracks correctly.

From here you should continue to register the account as normal, but do NOT enter any other codes at all in the registration page because this can cause the tracking of the affiliate clickthrough to fail.


Summary
In this guide we've looked at how to clear your cookies in Internet Explorer and then go on to visit the Betfair site via an affiliate link so that a cookie is dropped/spawned on your PC. We then went on to inspect the cookie and check that the cookie was correct. By following these steps it should ensure your registration to Betfair does track cleaning after clicking through our affiliate links.