Hi, I have kepted my own affiliate click-thru stats for linkshare and other major networks. I just done it out of curiosity and just incase they come in handly at a later date. I have checked them and they seem really good compared to what I am seeing in the networks. In other words, I have sent: 33,973 clicks to a merchant in Linkshare so far, but when I look at the "all time" stats since I started the merchant program it is showing that I have sent only 3,209 clicks to the merchant. So I was just wondering why my clicks are so high and the networks clicks are so low. I have found this happening with all the networks. Is it because I have someone profiting from my traffic by then manage to direct my clicks using their affiliate id or is it because the search engine robots could be making my personal stats increase on my site. I am using an "update query" whenever my clickthrough page is displayed which then redirects straight to the merchants site. Could the search engine robots be increasing it?
Actually, I think you are right now when I think about it. I remember my page was in Google and the other major search engines that redirects to the merchants site when a link is clicked. I thought that this was risky and it could ban me as the major search engines may think that I am using redirect pages or something. I had then put up a robots deny all robots sort of txt file about 3 months ago. I have not taken much notice of the stats, so I don't know if that has stopped the robots, but anyway, that most probably was the reason for me receiving so many clicks from my stats.
"I am using an "update query" whenever my clickthrough page is displayed which then redirects straight to the merchants site." So are you saying to re-direct the visitor to the merchant without the visitor having to click the link? That's called cookie stuffing and it's agains the TOS of most networks to generate an automated click that's not initiatied by the user. In addition to bot activity some networks only count one click per user in a certain time period. So if you have users clicking back and forth to the merchant over and over, maybe price checking and the network only counts uniques per 24 hours, that could be part of the issue too.
YOU ARE TOTALLY WRONG!!! I have been doing affiliate marketing for nearly 5 years now and it is all legit. I am not cookie stuffing and have never done it and I am infact against scams, spam and fraudulent activities when it comes to earning online. How I see things is why would I want to destroy or fraud something when in return I wouldn't like it done to me. Plus frauding and doing things not right doesn't get you anywhere. I think you have read all of this wrong or maybe I have written it so it sounds like that. These are real clicks from visitors clicking on the links from my site using something like: http://domainname.com/clickthru.php?productid=32332 Now what is wrong with that link, alot of sites use it. Now as you can see it is not displaying the actual referral link. Now when people click on that link it brings up the clickthru.php script that then has a redirect to the actual merchants site using the REDIRECT HEADERS. Within that script there is also an update query so that I can keep a count of all the clickthru's for each merchant. Many people track clicks this way. Please reply to this so that I know if you still think I am cookie stuffing.
So basically a visitor clicks a link on your website, the link directs him to another page on your website, this page updates a counter and then redirects the visitor to the affiliate link. That's nothing wrong with that, a lot of people use this mostly to hide the affiliate links, others use a counter as you are doing (and since the page seems to be on your website the SE bots hit it, your script count the hit but the affiliate network doesn't because it is not real human visitor) I think 5StarAffiliates didn't understand what you are doing...
I agree that I don't think 5StarAffiliates new what I was doing. lol Anyway, this page that updates my counter is actually not a page anyone will see. It is more of a script that anything. It is not really a page as such.