This ClickBank Affiliate's Hop Overrides Everyone Else's Hop All The Time - BlackHat?

hey,

so now that I've finished my new landing page for a CB product I wanna promote, I go through my routine of testing the links to make sure I see my affiliate ID on the bottom of the merchant's payment page.

Funnily enough, the product I've reviewed in #3 has a different affiliate ID (even though I clicked through on my hoplink). So I click on MY affiliate ID AGAIN, I see http://www.merchantsite.com/?hop=myaffiliateid as the URL - looking pretty normal right?

But when I go to order, the affiliate ID isn't 'myaffiliateid', it's someone elses.

So I tested this further by clicking on other affiliates links and lo and behold, this same affiliate's ID is always the one at the bottom of the order page - and his hoplink wasn't clicked last.

So I did some more testing... I cleared my cookies and the affiliate ID was then 'none'. Then I went to this sneaky affiliates landing page and clicked through his link and the same thing happened. His affiliate ID was always at the order page, no matter which hoplink was used last.

Now this doesn't just happen for 1 product, the same thing happens for all 3 products in his review. So it's not a merchant issue.

All his links follow this format:

So what is this guy doing? Looks like some form of blackhat to me, not sure what though.

I want to begin my adwords campaign for this, but how am I supposed to compete with this guy when he has this type of advantage?
Should I report him to ClickBank?

regards, Alex

 

Just post the link of the site here so I can check it out and tell you whether he's doing something Blackhat.
He might me cookie stuffing from what you said, but post the link so I can tell you for sure.

 

wierd - I just checked all this stuff again and its back to normal.

Not sure what's going but it didn't look like a CB issue.

I'll check his site again soon and if the dodgy stuff is still going on, i'll post it here

 

You should report him to CB and tell him you did so.

Here's a story, CB called me a few weeks ago, in a bit of a panic because one of my accounts was doing this (publisher account). Upon further inspection, sure enough, someone (assuming it's a keylogger injection system) actually breached our ftp, changed our index page, and every single visit that was a sale converted to his account. After some inspection, the CB affiliate was both stripped of earnings and banned. It could be happening without the publishers knowledge mate so give him/her a heads up, and report to CB just incase they are proactively doing this on purpose. Do not spend money or time on promotions until it's resolved.

**Also, the one we got hit with was advanced, as it would only trigger on the first few visits, then go back to normal. We found another version would only trigger from google traffic and nothing else, be forewarned and check the code on your pages. The pub might not even have this on his pages but it could be a server side hidden action... it could trigger on SE, be on a timer/scheduled, be on the first x visits, etc.

N.

 

There is of course the possibility that its your computer. A lot of people stuff downloads on torrents, kazaa, rapidshare forums, etc so that your computer will run their aff link. This has been pretty popular for a while.

 

Oops I just read this part again - I think wowhaxor is correct, something local on your machine perhaps. Try from another machine or two, and watch the cookies you get served as they come in.

N.

 

Yeah report him to clickbank they will investigate it more

 

He may be "cookie stuffing",a blackhat method.His site is also down now.

 

whatever is going on, please keep us posted, this is important info for us all!!

 

Cookie stuffing to my understanding is only good if it is the last cookie on the customer's browser before purchasing. So if someone gets cookie stuffed, but then afterwards they visit another affiliate's LP and click through their link, the stuffed cookie should be overwritten by a valid affiliate cookie.

The stuff in this thread seems very advanced in terms of not being able to overwrite the stuffed cookie. This is the stuff that scares me, as I have seen a huge decrease in my sales.

My Story:
I installed a conversion tracking software onto my most successful campaign since Google Adwords tracking is crap. I'll tell you why it's crap. If someone clicks your Adwords ad, goes to your LP, clicks your affiliate link, goes to the merchant page but then decides to do more research and bounces from the merchant's site, then goes to another affiliate site and clicks through their link and buys the product, Adwords still counts this as YOUR conversion. I sure as hell don't want to be notified that my salescopy contributed to some other affiliate's good fortune, especially since I'm paying for it!!

So this new tracking software tracks everyone's IP address that comes to my LP. So I can see when they come in, when they click on my affiliate link, and when they purchase the product. I recorded 10 conversions in both Adwords (sketchy) and my new tracking software (accurate). But in Clickbank I showed ZERO sales. I now knew something was going on (since installing this software), and here's why:

1. My tracking software only counts conversions when someone clicks on my outgoing link and then "sees" the merchant's thank you page. Google counts conversions for people who click on your adwords ad and then sees the merchant's thank you page. Alot can happen in between clicking an Adwords ad and a thank you page and therefore can be very inaccurate (could be literally days in between this timespan etc).
2. My tracking software has timestamps of all the IP addresses of the outgoing clicks to the merchant page.
3. My tracking software also records timestamps of when the customer made a purchase (i.e. saw the merchant's thank you page). All purchases made were within 1 or 2 minutes after reaching the merchant's page from my LP!!

With the above, it is highly unlikely that the customer clicked my link, went to the merchant's page, BOUNCED, the clicked on another affiliate's link and purchased all within 1 or 2 minutes. This might be the case if I was promoting MMO where we have some saavy affiliates that have their own CB accounts, but this is something totally unrelated where the customer would have no idea about affiliate commissions or anything like that.

SOMETHING PHK'D IS GOING ON here and I have completely stopped with CB until this gets resolved. I have notified CB and have provided them with the IP addresses that I thought should have been my sales for their investigation. If I see them all as the same affiliate ID, that affiliate needs to get banned and we need to determine how they did this. If I don't see any affiliate attached to the sale, then there is something wrong with CB's tracking system for affiliates. Either that or the publisher you are working with could be scamming you out of your commissions but the one I'm working with is a standup guy and accusing him would be my last resort in getting this whole thing resolved.

Thanks to the OP for creating this thread and let's hope these bastards get busted for this so that our commissions can get back to normal.

 

Oh and btw OP, REPORT THAT AFFILIATE TO CB!

 

Holy moses Norb!

What happens to the earnings that CB took back, doesn't go to the original publisher who could have spent good money on the traffic does it! Did you get it or does CB just keep it?

This is worrying me mate, I have sent a few thousand hops to your sites over the last few months and very few conversions.

aaarrrggghhhhh

 

It is all puzzling... and worst thing is I have started checking my hoplinks and when I go to checkout, it is showing as affiliate = none

I use php redirects and have a TID for them... I tried 5 times and only showed my affiliate ID once...

Some possible considerations:

CB tracking issue
Browser issues (I used the latest firefox browser)

 

They should go through their stats, and give the money to the previous hop. Surely the original hop has to go through their system before hitting the hacked site. I'd definitely be asking clickbank about this one - especially if you were promoting the hacked site.

 

OMFG, I just noticed that on my hoplinks too...

Now WTF IS THIS? Jezzzzzzzzz, and after all this, Clickbank is "the best digital product retailer"...

 

noticed what? that your aff id isn't tracked or someone overrides your cookie?

 

Think are getting messy, I have two PC's, when I enter my hoplink in one of them I don't get my cb ID in the checkout page, I get some id's,

I checked them on the other PC, everthing is alright, my aff.id shows as it should.

I must have some spyware that is stuffing a cookie right before you enter the checkout page.

 

Checking the same browser on both PCs or a different browser? (browser version as well... as it could be a problem specific to firefox latest browser etc).

 

I don't think CB has all the previous affiliate cookies + the last stuffed cookie in their system per sale. How would they know who each of the millions of sales they make should go to?

It also really isn't CB's problem if one of the merchant's sites are hacked. They really shouldn't be under any obligation to pay because a merchant's site wasn't up to par or was inadvertently hacked by someone good. I think it would be up to the merchant to give out missed commissions to the affiliate (if any), but determining how this would be done is another story.

It IS CB's responsibility to ensure that all their cookies are compatible with all major browsers, especially Firefox as this is probably the second most commonly used browser. It IS also their responsibility to ensure that their tracking system is up to par, and accurately represents affiliate commissions. This doesn't seem to be the case though, unless we have some brilliant BH'er that is beating the system on all fronts.

 

Also, my "missing" sales have nothing to do with the browser type as my tracking software is telling me I am missing both IE and Firefox sales.