I am currently direct linking from PPC to affiliate offers on CJ and I would like to hide the keywords using redirects (meta-refreshes or js, whichever) but I heard that CJ frowns upon this and it will hurt me in the long run. Anyone have any experience with this? I plan on using tracking202 for this.
CJ frowns upon it - There's no reason to cloak the source in CJ, as advertisers cannot see the query strings (anything after the "?" in a URL) to protect keywords that affiliates use. Only CJ's network quality team can see the query string, and that's just to make sure search policies are not being violated. Network quality will not give out the keywords or full URLs under any circumstances.
Theres a newish script over at blackhatworld that supposedly will allow you to use any url as a referrer. I'm not sure how exactly it's done, but I know it involves redirecting to a page with an Iframe which in turn redirects to your merchants website. You should look into it.
Actually, one of the biggest reasons why I'm looking to cloak/redirect/iframe etc is because I have M offers each with N ads each with R keywords and I have no idea what keywords are converting or what ads are working the best so I was hoping to go direct to my tracking202 site which would then redirect to the offer. But as you mentioned that cloaking, redirecting is against their TOS I'm not sure what else I can do to hook up tracking202...
Redirecting is not against their TOS - use a PHP header redirect (or something else that throws a 3xx HTTP code) rather than something that does a meta refresh. Tracking202 should offer a standard 302 redirect... Cloaking will occur with a meta refresh - I'd advise against it, or you'll probably get your account flagged in CJ.
I understand now, it makes sense. I changed my destination urls in YSM to use the tracking202 urls, but it's been 3 days now and they still haven't approved them... tvmatt: Can you tell me if it's ok to setup adsense so that it goes to tracking202 -> affiliate landing page or is that against AdSense's TOS? I read that YSM doesn't care, but AdSense doesn't allow redirects or framing. I'm tired of waiting days for YSM to approve little things like destination url changes (not display url). Thanks for your help.
AdWords doesn't care if you go through a standard redirect - most tracking links do this. However, the display URL of your ad must match the final destination of the ad. So if your redirect is track123.com/something, and it lands on merchant.com, your display URL must read "merchant.com". Check with the advertiser's Keyword Policy to verify if you're able to do this.