Technical question for affiliates
 

We recent revamped our site wettingherpanties.com and have opened it up to enable linking to anyone of our 1061 videos, 1936 photosets and 347 different model pages.

Up until now we've have been getting affiliates to use the standard CCBill cookie linking method, but have now also added a direct linking method, with no cookie.

My question to those affiliates out there is, which do you prefer?


As we see it, each has it's pro's and con's

The pro's to the affiliate cookie method is that if the customer doesn't bite on a first visit but returns to the site and a sale is made, then the referring affiliate is going to be credited because the cookie has remembered you sent them there in the first place. A major con is that many peoples security software will strip out the CCBill cookie by default and you where never going to get the sale either way, whether for a referred first time sale or a return visit sale at some future date.

The direct link method at least gives you a guarantted credit for those first visit sales, every single time. There is no cookie too be removed and therefore you will always be credited with the sale. This is fine, as long as a sale is made on the first visit. If not, you hard work in making the future customer aware of the product has been in vain.

We planned on have both linking methods availiable to give affiliates a choice, but I'd be interested in people views. We're not the affilliate, you guys are and that's why I ask.

Please excuse some of my probably incorrect terminalogy, but I hope you grasp my point, all a little new to this :)

*its
*pros
*cons

Hi Damian,

Funny, I've been thinking about contacting you actually. I'd like to see if you can help us. I like your thinking. I love a punctuation/grammar Nazi too. As you point out, never my strong point :)

Your site could set a cookie. Takes 2 minutes to set up and problem solved.

It does. That's my point :)

We have both methods of linking. I ask, as I'm interested in what affiliates want or prefer.

I presume from your comment, perhaps incorrectly (excuse me), that you might prefer the cookie method? Just interested in people views on this.

You said it is either the CCBill cookie method or a direct link to your site. I assume this direct link means http://wettingherpanties.com/?affiliate=joeblow instead of using the CCBill redirect that would set a CCBill cookie. It would not take you a lot of work to have your own site set its own cookie (affiliate=joeblow). If you do it like that, your affiliates can use your new deeplinking setup and they would still get credited if the surfer returns on a later day to sign up.

You could set up your "direct" link to bounce off one of your own pages amd thus have three methods.

If your direct link maintains the referral in the URL once the affiliate is on the page, you could set up a bookmark link - but my experience has been that surfers come back to the referring site if it's not full of popunders, redirects and distracting, annoying ads - so he's always clicking your trusted link.

Surfers seem to be creatures of habit and return to the trusted, the niche site, the place where they first went to favorite site/s because it's one bookmark for a page that updates to all their favorite "porn neighbourhood spots".

:D

You could store a server-side cookie and build a "metaprofile" for that user. IP, GEO, User Agent, Referring URL, Associated Affiliate, Original Date, Return Date etc... And when the user comes back, if there is a 90% match within X days or whatever, then just associate them back to the original affiliate.

But do the users get a hardlink or is there a ?variable instead of a /variable?

Lots of users share links on forums and such and ?variables are often stripped out, but if it's a slash variable they're preserved...

:D

Implement NATS :thumbsup

Skymouse_Productions,


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