Has anyone noticed how the affiliate links for some CCBill sites do not look like the typical CCBill link? One that comes to mind are the FHG links for Muscle Partners sites such as this:
As many of you know, Muscle Partners assigns an ID number to each site an affiliate promotes them on (in the above link I replaced my ID number with XXX for the purpose of this post). I’ve often wondered how links like these impact stats in CCBill.
I’m not accusing anyone of anything and my traffic to MP sites seems to be consistent. I just wonder why they don’t use the traditional deep linking method that other CCBill sites do, and if there is anything odd about the above linking method.
I would LOVE to adopt something like this. Our Google stats suffer because all the sites that link to us do it through CCBill.com. It would be AMAZING if all the affiliate blogs could link directly to us. If I could figure out what he did, I would honestly do the same!
is very easy to know if the ID work or no.
once test the link and enter in the site, go to the ccbill join page, in the html code you’ll need to find this
[QUOTE=msm;109683]Has anyone noticed how the affiliate links for some CCBill sites do not look like the typical CCBill link? One that comes to mind are the FHG links for Muscle Partners sites such as this:
As many of you know, Muscle Partners assigns an ID number to each site an affiliate promotes them on (in the above link I replaced my ID number with XXX for the purpose of this post). I’ve often wondered how links like these impact stats in CCBill.
I’m not accusing anyone of anything and my traffic to MP sites seems to be consistent. I just wonder why they don’t use the traditional deep linking method that other CCBill sites do, and if there is anything odd about the above linking method.[/QUOTE]
I’m guessing they are using Apache .htaccess to set a cookie or rewrite the URL’s within the FHG to include your ID… Very simple to do…
For example .htaccess could easily send the traffic to this FHG:
You still get the credit for the sale but this will only appear in CCBill as a click if they proceed from the FHG to the main site. You won’t see any click count information for the first click into the FHG… Obviously this makes the ratios seem much better but I think most of know that FHG don’t convert very well as it is or at least that is my experience. Might as well trim out the fat and see how well the ratios are with those who are actually interested enough to proceed.
Yeah, I guess I never thought about doing something like this in PHP because I feel like there is an inherent mistrust that affiliates have of program owners. And I am sure it is very well-deserved. So the bigger question is, seeing as how this thread exists in the first place, if I did this on our site, would people trust us that everything is going to work? If so, I am going to implement this right away…
Problem with keeping the CCBill id in the url is that you end up with multiple affiliates pointing to multiple url’s to the same content. I have done this couple years back and the steps are as follows.
When url lands the person on the site, you use PHP to parse the url, take the data, and save it into a cookie.
Redirect to the url minus the query string. This guarantees that all incoming links point to one main url and not multiple url’s pointing to the same content.
Create the ccbill url and forward to the main paysite.
By using PHP and url parsing, you can have all the same incoming url’s for google, and the affiliates still get paid.
Wow, what a great article! But two things in it confused me:
You can also get a few PA for the same program (by joining it again) for traffic/sales tracking purposes, because thereâs no extended information like page where the customer came from on affiliate side of CCBill Affiliate (thereâs one for program owners). Just be sure you donât refer yourself, otherwise youâll violate programâs TOS. Clean your CCBill cookie for that program (search it by CA of that program) before creating any additional account.
It must be late because my brain can’t comprehend what that paragraph is suggesting.
So you’re saying that an affiliate can re-write the CCBill link a sponsor provides into the proper format? I always thought this had to happen on the sponsors side.
[QUOTE=msm;110177]Wow, what a great article! But two things in it confused me:
It must be late because my brain can’t comprehend what that paragraph is suggesting.
So you’re saying that an affiliate can re-write the CCBill link a sponsor provides into the proper format? I always thought this had to happen on the sponsors side.[/QUOTE]
you use PA1 for your site1 and use PA2 for your site2.
That info in your quote1 wasn’t correct. I’ve changed it to the following
You can also get a few PA for the same program (by joining it again) for traffic/sales tracking purposes. Just be sure you donât refer yourself, otherwise youâll violate programâs TOS. Clear your CCBill cookie for that program (search it by CA of that program) before creating any additional account.
I suggest to set CCBill cookie first before sending your traffic to sponsor’s managed FHG by using CCBill link at the beginning.