Merchant policy on page redirection

Will it be considered as a fraud?

[ndaru]

Hi,

Most of my visitors came to my site looking for free contents. I though I can gain small revenue by offering related items like books, software or free services. But it seems my visitors are very busy. They just dig what they looking for, and left my site.

Now I plan to do this:

- if a visitor click on one of my content links, it will also open a new window to my sponsor site (a related one, of course).
- I use cookies, so the sponsor window will only open once in a week.

Will it be considered as a fraud?

Thank you for sharing.

Ndaru.

[vibgyor79]

If it is a CPM or a CPC affiliate program, then it would be considered as fraud/inappropriate. If it is a pay per sale or pay per lead affiliate program, then you are fine.

Suggestion: Don't bother too much with pop up windows. When was the last time you clicked on a popup ad/window and PURCHASED something there?

Try using text ads on your page rather than banners or popups.

Ashwin

[ndaru]

Thanks for your input, Ashwin.

Actually it is a pay-per-lead, but their link goes directly to a spesific product. Just let the page loads completely and it will be considered as a lead. Yes, it looks and feels like pay-per-click.

You're right, I guess applying page redirection on this kind of link is inappropriate. I'm going to cancel it.

Ndaru.

[1Lit]

Are you saying pay per click affiliate programs shouldn't open in a new window? Some of them are paying one or two cents a click in this day and age. If we had to open them in the same window, it would not be worth losing the visitors we pay 10 cents in the pay-per-click-search-engines to somebody offering us 2 cents. Do you agree?

[vibgyor79]

I guess it is better to read the "terms and conditions" of the pay per click affiliate program. Generally, most PPC affiliate programs include clauses like -

1) No traffic delivery through popups, popunders and its variants
2) No traffic delivery through 404 error page
3) No traffic delivery through blind links
4) The page should NOT be loaded in a frame (this prevents affiliates from using one of those 'traffic exchanges' where you click.. click.. click.. and get visitors)

It is simply not worth it if the merchant is paying $0.01 per click.

[buckworks]

The bottom line with most merchants paying PPC is that they only want to pay for visits from people who deliberately and knowingly decided to follow the link to their page. Few merchants will be willing to pay for clicks generated in any other way.

The merchant might not mind you using automatic means to generate page views if you are being paid strictly by sales commisions, because they will only be paying for actual results. Check first, though, because that could chew up a lot of bandwidth.