referring URLs in sponsor stats
 

If a sponsor lists "unknown" in the referring pages stats, what could that mean? What would be the possiblilities of so many "unknown" clicks?

No idea, but with Nasty Dollars most of my referring urls show "no data".
ARS, Silver Cash etc, show the referrer in 95% cases though.

Shitty software.

Another strange thing that is going on w/ another sponsor is that I'm getting URL's listed that don't have the linking codes on them.

dude i get all sorts of wacked out shit. on nats i got a referal signup from consumption junction. i dont advertise on there :)

heh

whatever tho

as long as its coin

Can't speak for others- but we track our LinkFrom(tm) data for security reasons without server side includes. The info is handy and meant to augment the reporting but tracking a referral url is not as critical as the hard coded webmaster id for example. Also your traffic may come in a fashion that makes tracking the ref url difficult as well. All depends on the source, target, and technology imo.

PARIS is hosting SNL tonight - Fucking traffic is insane already!!!

I'm guessing it can track the 1st page the surfer goes to before going to the page where they click the link?

About 20-30% of tgp surfers have privacy blocking software or other reasons they don't present a valid referer.

Some sponsors/processors seem to lose a lot more than that though.

If You have some pages with Meta Refesh'es on them, it could be traffic from there...
I just noticed this today and had to switch to JS redirecting on those pages instead.

Appearantly it's a browser-standard to NOT pass the referer if the visitor is coming from such a redirect. :(