affiliate traffic has no referer?

[jbroder]

I am an affiliate merchant and one of my affiliates is sending me a lot of traffic that has no http referer information.

I know that many computers are configured to not send http referer, but traffic overall still has much more frequent referer info than this affiliate's traffic, which has about 98% with no referer info.

It is really weird. I have never seen this pattern before.

Is there a way to stop referer info from being sent on the server side?

Is there any explanation for this you can think of?

[eljefe3]

I don't know anything about the SSI stuff, but have you asked this affiliate where his traffic comes from? Is the traffic legitimate? Your software should also show which site the traffic came from, otherwise how would the affiliate get the credit if his referral id wasn't there?

Yes firefox and opera ( as well as IE7 I believe) do not show referrer data, but still your software should be able to track where the click came from.

[ergophobe]

Also, using header() in PHP you should be able to overwrite the referrer header in a redirect script and make it empty, but in that case one would expect 100% to be without referrer.

[dataguy]

Is there any explanation for this you can think of?

Your affiliate partner is sending traffic from a bot which doesn't fake the HTTP Referrer. Typically 98% of web traffic I recieve has referral information, I would imagine this is pretty standard if not low. The other 2% is probably Fire Fox users who have installed something to turn off the referral info.

I hope you don't pay your affiliate partners for traffic alone. One thing you might try is to put a message in from off all the traffic that that this partner is sending you which says, "click here" to continue. I bet none click....

[bateman_ap]

I do this for some direct merchant PPC work. I don't want you getting my keywords :)

[jvanv8]

I send users to affiliate websites and have gotten a notice that many users (but not all) I sent had no referrer. I am using a javascript redirect on all outbound traffic. A regular "click here if you are not redirected" link is also displayed just in case.

Like Dataguy, I think the affiliate thinks I have some bot or spyware app that is sending bots or users to their site. But, I don't do either.. just plain old javascript redirect.

I too have no idea why they are not seeing referrer information. I've thought about using php header() functions to explicitly set the referrer to make sure it is correct.

There MUST be another reason for the missing referrer info. Could it be a reporting problem? The affiliate network in question is CJ.

[jimbeetle]

Didn't opening a link in a new window sometimes/always stop referrer info being sent in IE? Is this still the case in newer versions? And I seem to remember other almost normal situations where the referrer wasn't always passed. Back of mind it's one of the reasons I don't opt in to any aff program that only uses referrer info for tracking.