The rub is the underlying objective: Proving fraud or the absence thereof. If you don't trust the PPC provider's statistical reporting - if they say "our stats done lie" - do you sound the alarm? Simply walk away? Lawyer up? Report the matter to the attorney general or prosecutor, since such action would amount to theft?
The bottom line with domain parking is to determine which agency provides the greatest revenue. That's the statistic that I would suggest client's keep their eye on.
Enom's Traffic Vista would be ideal except I'd have to transfer all my domain's there, which I'm not about to do. It could run a bit expensive for me too. I had been wondering if there was a service or script which might track these hits before forwarding the hit onto my PPC provider.
I had also considered url forwarding the domains at the registrar to my website which would consist of 1 page per domain with the sole purpose of forwarding the hit onto my PPC provider, and setting up some tracking stats on the website. Or maybe I could just edit my .htaccess file. However, I'm not sure how such a hit would be seen by my PPC provider. Would they see the original hit, or would they see all hits coming from 1 website, and consider it fraud/spam.
Would running my own dns server and tracking stats be a better option? Would it even work? Although I'm rather reluctant to go down that path because I'm unsure about redundancy issues.
Assuming that is what you mean, I gather your intent is to stand in front of the parking service and collect statistics prior to sending the traffic on to them.
First thing is to check if your parking services permit this - both legal-agreement wise, and technically.
I note that most parking services ask you to set your DNS pointers at your registrar to point to their name servers. You need to determine if they require this from a legal standpoint, and if they enforce this by some technical means. If they enforce it, there is no way you can do what you want to do.
If you have some that enforce it, and some that do not, some thought is indicated as to why they do it. It might be so that they can be in control of every aspect of quality. Once they give you control of some part of the whole picture on your own equipment, they've lost control of that aspect of quality. On the other hand, they may be wishing to control the statistics you are able to obtain. You may wish to drop those services that don't permit you to control your own DNS, or you may wish to stick with those who do, while taking control of those that will permit it.
As far as DNS, I do not recommend literally running your own DNS server. But I'm a big fan of taking control of your DNS, by using a third-party DNS provider and not relying on either your registrar or your hosting service. (Or, in this case, parking service.) IMO, companies that specialize in DNS do a better job of DNS than those for whom is is just an an annoying sideline that they feel they have to provide to be competitive. A good third-party DNS provider will likely do a better and more reliable job than your registrar, web host, or parking company.
(BTW, there is an interesting discussion elsewhere here on "Trusted TLDs", based on some examination of a Google patent. While the main focus of the post is on "trusted" domains, such as .gov and .edu, it suggests, among other things, that where and how both your web site and DNS are hosted might influence page rankings. Bascially, how "professional" is your hosting? There are, for example, DNS services that are used almost exclusively by only top-tier websites. Ditto for web hosting services. Why WOULDN'T a search engine ranking algorithm use this as an indicator of authority?)
There certainly are commercial services that can handle the statistics for you. Their primary market is eCommerce sites and PPC advertisers. They collect the statistics and then forward to your site. Your parking provider will still see the same statistics and referral URL - they will NOT see these redirects as all coming from a single site. I would check on specific contract terms, as I am unfamiliar with the terms of parking services. I do know that this is standard practice for, say PPC advertising through companies such as Google or Yahoo (Overture). They have no problem with you having your ads point at a statistics service, which they forwards to your web site.
As well, there are plenty of packages to choose from (both free and commercial) that you can install on your own website. So, if you so choose, you certainly could have a website that does nothing more than collect statistics and forward on to the parking services. You would be running your own version of the commercial statistics services. In fact, many of them offer the choice of either paying them on a subscription basis to provide the service or licensing their software to install on your own server. There are also numerous free solutions. Bascially, you could use any tool that webmasters use to count their own traffic in this application, and should you want to go this way, I'd suggest you puruse the "Tracking and Logging" forum here.
Yes,that's exactly what I meant by PPC Providers, aka Parking Services.
Yes, that's exactly what I'd like to do. Stand in front of the Parking Services and collect stats and then pass on the hit to the Parking Services.
Yes, I thought I might as well bite the bullet and ask the Parking Services directly what they will allow and is possible. I'm still awaiting their reply.
In my experience, most of these Parking Services permit either URL forwarding or pointing to their own dns servers. My preferred Parking Services allows both.
I'll sticky you for some suggestions for third-party DNS servers. I'd also be interested in any Stats service where they first receive the hit and then pass it onto to my Parking Service. I didn't know that kind of service existed. But it's exactly what I want to do.
So you think it's a doable proposition to have all my parked domains pointing at 1 website and to forward the hit onto the Parking Service? What kind of forwarding/redirecting should I use to pass the original hit along to the Parking Service? (ie they might see it as fraud if all my hits are all coming from my 1 website). This might possibly be my preferred option. To use a Stats service (Google Analytics et al) or a Stats package installed directly on my website.
I have already started a thread in Tracking and Logging which I hadn't realised existed until after my original post.
Thank you again
What kind of forwarding/redirecting should I use to pass the original hit along to the Parking Service? (ie they might see it as fraud if all my hits are all coming from my 1 website).
You want to do a 301 redirect. Some registrars, hosts, and DNS services refer to "DNS forwarding". There's actually no such thing. "DNS forwarding" is actually a combination of pointing your domain to a server at the service provider, which is set-up to do a 301 redirect for you. You can do this yourself using any webserver, as well.
When you do it yourself, of course, in most cases you are also collecting statistics as part of the webserver's normal logging, which can then be analyzed with the logfile analyzer included with most webservers. When you use a third-party tracking service, you are pointing your domain to them, they log the hit and forward to the final destination (your web site, parking page, etc.)
What happens when you do a redirect is that a message is sent back to the browser, saying, essentially, "what you want isn't here - go THERE instead.". The browser then sends a second HTTP request to the redirected address.
BTW, this can be continued ad-infinitum. A can redirect to B, which redirects to C, etc. However, there is a practical limit, as each redirect takes time. And that is one disadvantage you have to contend with in any case - a redirect incurs an unavoidable delay in reaching your web site.
In any case, this doesn't interfere in any way with the ultimate destination properly identifying the source of the request. It's the user's browser making the request - it's not literally being "forwarded" through another website.
Using an .htaccess file has a few side benefits too. It's much easier to globally update the url if you change parking services. A simple text find and replace would do it. Beats editing each domains DNS to update the url forwarding page to the new parking service.
