clicks not registered by affiliate programs

[gc]

Hi,

i'm somewhat new to the adult webmaster scene, anyway my linklist runs the link to affiliate sites true a redirect script to count outgoing hits / generate stats etc. Apparently about half of the affiliate programs don't register my send hits. Anyone any ideas?

Kind regards, Thomas - XXX Movie Crawler
http://www.xxxmoviecrawler.com

[ronnie]

Guess first question, are your links correct? Do they have your affiliate id in them? I see that mistake happen very often. Maybe your redirect script is not working right? Hard to say for sure.

ronnie

[gc]

well urls are correct, but if others use redirects to all their affiliates and they don't have any problems i'm guessing its one on my side
And the few linklists i've checked all use hardlinks to their sponsors...

[cd34]

Its also possible that the sponsors you are using are counting 2nd page clicks rather than first page clicks. Or are counting Uniques and you are counting Raw.

On a 2nd Page click, the surfer hits the first page, but is not counted until they move off that page. Its supposed to be more accurate because popping the page in a console that is closed immediately isn't a surfer that will have made an attempt to buy, therefore its not counted. Or so the theory goes.

Counting Raw versus Unique is another thing that is done. If you send the same IP to the tour 10 times, it would be counted as 1 Unique hit. Since there was only 1 IP address, only 1 click is counted. Obviously there are issues with AOL's proxy server setup where multiple surfers do appear to come from one IP.

Its also possible that you have encoded your links and they are not passing all of the arguments. If your clickout script is something like:

/cgi-bin/clickout.cgi?url=http://www.site.com/refer.cgi?variable=1&tour=2

When your cgi script reads the variable url, depending on how your code is written, it could chop things off at the first ? or the &. You might verify it by printing the URLs rather than redirecting and testing to make sure the parameters are going through as expected. Then, you can play with URL encoding your links so that things are being passed through.

[gc]

nah i encode the & char, so the redirect script will get something like:
/cgi-bin/clickout.cgi?url=http://www.site.com/refer.cgi?variable=1%26tour=2

i don't have to encode the ? char since the http server will only go for the first ? and don't pay any attention second ?.

Further when i click the links, i get parsed to the right urls with the right var settings.

And other affiliates with more than 1 var etc get registered correctly

which should effectively fix all those problems.
Further, yes it's possible they only count second page or only uniques, but the case is i send about 50 raw hits to these sponsors / day and they don't count a single one of them and this is not over 1 day or so but more like 2 weeks.

regards, thomas

[Linkster]

in that case you might want to ask the sponsor - but if that doesnt help you can always pm one of us if you dont want to post the sponsors name and we can probably tell you if they are using 2nd page counting or not

[gc]

i've dispatched emails to their support departments

but i'm pretty sure it's not only that just second page clicks get registered. I'm more afraid there is a problem somewhere in my coding :/

Can anyone acknowledge that the HTTP header field "Location:" can handle URI's with variables attached?

regards, Thomas