social networking link leaks on tours
 

so more and more tours and sites now have their social networking links on their sites, do you consider this a leak?

I was clicking around on some sites and its hard not to notice the big "follow us on twitter" links on tours )via affiliate links)

thoughts?

In a way yes I guess theoretically it can be a leak...

Yup. Most definitely.

it sucks

Yes, it definitely is a leak. Affiliate tours should be leak free.

absolutely no social network links on paysite tours via affiliate links.

the only external link you should have on a tour is the one that goes to the processor, all else is the sponsor stealing affiliate traffic.

.

It is a leak. What they need to do is make such links on the affiliate tour point to join pages.

Technically it's a leak but the bigger "leak" is a lame site combined with Google toolbar

leak plain and simple

Yes, those are definitely leaks.

Even worse are those affiliate tours with footers that ask the surfer to sign up for their mailings but don't mark those subscribers as your potential member. Then as soon as your 10-day (or less) cookie expires they email them strong offers with special discounts and lower price points than are offered on the affiliate tour. You sent them the surfer but you get no credit when they join that way.

Traffic leaks, social networking leaks, email address capturing, short cookie life, submitting their long video clips to tube sites... sometimes I think sponsors are testing to see how much underhanded dealing with affiliates they can get away with.

What ever happened to providing affiliates with absolutely clean, leak-free tours? Sponsors could do whatever they like on the public tour pages, but doing these kinds of things with affiliate traffic is reaching into the affiliate's pocket to take money that should belong to the affiliate.

At least that's my opinion.

It was like this years ago with yahoo groups.... was leak then is leak now.

I thought about it long and hard when I was putting my new paysites together (see sig lol) and while I WANTED to put the matching twitter, tumblr & facebook links on the tours the more and more I decided it was a bad idea do to them being leaks.

Instead I'm going to be making sep tour pages for the search engines and my own traffic network that will feature the 'social leaks'

As for low cookie lifes that Simon pointed out, I've NEVER understood that myself, I originally set out to have 90 day cookies but after talking to my tech ppl, and CCBILL they agreed that that was pretty much overkill (due to clearing browser caches, and other things) so in the end I went with a 45 day cookie.

-Loki-

I never understood short cookie lifetimes either. For my old affiliate program we set the cookies for 255 days (which was the CCBill maximum at the time). I never wanted to take one penny from an affiliate's pocket when I was already getting 100% of the signup price on my own tour pages. As far as I was concerned, if that cookie never got over-written and some surfer came back 10 months later and signed up for a membership, I was absolutely happy to pay the affiliate who brought in that customer originally.

I work with good sponsors who've given me longer cookies because I've asked for them, including some who give me one-year cookies. Which tells me that there are sponsors who really do get it ... and then there are sponsors who just want to take all they can off the table, even if the traffic originally came from you.