Technology behind sites that give away free widgets

[WallaceCleaver]

How do sites that give away free widgets in exchange for people signing up for offers track people? How can they be sure that the people are actually signing up for the offers?

[sidewinder]

Through the user tracking functions most networks and some inhouse programs offer.
For CJ look up SID, linkshare is u1, befree has a code also that escapes me at the moment.

[WallaceCleaver]

How difficult is it to implement SID?

[fclark]

If the visitors are clicking from your site to the merchant, it's fairly simple. All you have to do is add a unique url variable to the CJ link:

If this is an example aff link:

hteeteepee://ansozers.net/click-12345-12345

then it would become:

hteeteepee://ansozers.net/click-12345-12345?sid=123456789

where the 123456789 is unique to a particular visitor (up to 64 chars I think), so you can't just hard code it into your aff links. Best to use some scripting such as coldfusion, php, etc.

In coldfusion, it would look like this:

hteeteepee://ansozers.net/click-12345-12345?sid=#cfid#

where #cfid# places a number that is unique to each visitor on the end of the url if you have enabled application variables. Alternatively, if you don't have server-side scripting capability, then you could send your clicks through another tracking service that would simply tack it on for you before forwarding them to the CJ network.

[shorebreak]

Is it me, or are these incentive-based marketing programs starting to mushroom over the last few months? They must have an insanely good revenue model to be able to be advertising as much as they do.

[fclark]

Hi shorebreak
I don't do incentive-based. Just helping w/ sid.