Is it possible to miss signups because of redirect script?
 

sometimes I use a script like this to redirect to a site using my affiliate link
is it possible some hits are being tracked but signups are missing? :helpme

I use a lot of the same methods and have always wondered this myself. Though it does count traffic/sales I have always wondered if any slip through and are not credited to me.

Yes it is possible... I wrote a post about this a year back... that some affiliates are not tracking leads sent as a header redirect like that... I forget who it was now but there are definitely some that, for some reason, don't pick it up...

What I ended up doing was using google analytics to track my links out... everything that links out gets a

onclick="_tracker.trackEvent('linkName',$site_id,$ location_id);"

And I just link them off... that way I get the stats but I don't have to send the user to a redirect page and worry about any programs which may not be (for some unknown reason) tracking the affiliate code correctly...

There is no way a landing page can know if a visitor was sent via a redirect or by any other means. What is more likely is that the client reads the header but does not obey the redirect, i.e. the visitor is not a normal browser client but a bot of some kind that is appearing to follow the links on your page but actually going no further than just retrieving the headers.

This can happen of course by using a proxy or plugin/add on or other security software which prevents header information to be send.
I think there will be also other reasons.

i use that script on all my sites and still getting sales, so...

Most browsers only allow a limited # of redirects, so it is possible that if you are doing a redirect and the sponsor is doing a couple of them, that the user's browser might refuse to follow them in the extremely unlikely case that the user had manually changed the maximum # of redirects to a very low #.


q f t

I use this method and it seems to be tracking all sales

no, linking like that is good.

i wouldn't worry about it

This, or more commonly - some asshole affiliate decides to try to hotlink to a join page, and wonders why their ratios went sky high but their traffic numbers went to shit.

Don't try to subersively make it faster/easier for your surfers to check out. If you don't confirm that it will always work with your program, it may not. I've seen people try to hard code invalid option ids, try to do an external post to signup pages, it's all a mess. Use your goddamn linkcodes or ASK before you try something. Just because it works once, doesn't mean that it always will.

Also, that 301 redirect is fine, but not the best way of doing it for NATSv3/NATSv4. Your link code isn't valid, either.