I recently had a new affiliate call me to say that he was trying to start promoting my product, and he was having an issue. When using the clickbank hoplink, his id was not showing on the order page. I checked the hoplink he was using on my computer and it worked. Turned out that his computer was blocking the clickbank cookies. He then said to me, "So, if I send visitors and they have cookies blocked, I lose credit for the sale?"...unfortunately, that is a clickbank issue and the answer is yes. Many people probably have cookies blocked...either on purpose, or because they installed some anti-spyware or anti-ad software that is blocking the clickbank cookies along with other cookies. So...I added some code to my product page to fix that issue and make sure my affiliates get the sale even if the user has cookies blocked. To make use of this feature, my affiliates need to use my custom links (provided on my affiliate page) instead of the standard clickbank hoplinks. http://www.nobudgetfilmmaking.com/link?a=YOUR_ID Code (markup): Basically, I am logging the affiliate id, and then passing it to the order page directly, even if clickbank cookies are not being set. Making sure affiliates get their commisions! Good idea right???
Well, I figure that my strong suit is making the product and making the sales page. The affiliates are the ones who know how to do the hard part...getting targeted traffic to my product. The least I can do is try my best to make sure they get their money.
But this way has impact on the CB tracking...right? It will not show the full stats. This might not be good for your future stats or screenshots, it might lead to inconsistency. But, big plus for what you are doing for the affiliates.
Good idea, but this only works if they have cookies enabled. It's a good fix if they block the Clickbank hop cookie itself, but if they block your session cookie too (or if they're blocking ALL cookies by default) this won't fix it. To really solve the problem you'd have to either a) write a different session handler that identified users by matching their IP address, user-agent and other gumpf, or b) pass the PHPSESSID through all the links on your page so the regular session handler can re-establish itself (and even that wouldn't fix the case of someone clicking through the hoplink, leaving the website or closing their browser, then returning the next day). Effective and non-invasive tracking is a difficult issue, although http://panopticlick.eff.org is making very good progress into fingerprinting browsers.
No, this does NOT impact the CB tracking...it does not bypass the clickbank cookies in any way, it simply adds another step of inserting the affiliate id IF (and only IF) the clickbank cookie was not set. You are correct, that this is not a prefect fix for all cases. Right now I am just using a browser session to add the affiliate id to the order IF the clickbank cookie was not set. I agree that using a db to track the users via ip would be needed to really give a much more foolproof solution for return visitors...but is this enough of a problem to warrant that much work?