Forum Moderators: skibum
In February, after six months of sending visitor traffic (~1,000 clicks) to this affiliate with zero conversions, I took a closer look. No wonder there were zero conversions. The affiliate store was simply a front-end to the Big Name A e-commerce site, with no added value or salesmanship beyond merely listing Big Name A's wares.
In mid February, I removed from my site all of this affiliate's advertisements, icons, links, and other forms of access to the affiliate.
Now, here comes the interesting part:
To check my click, conversion, and earnings stats, I was supposed to visit a chart at Big Name B's e-commerce site. (Huh? What is the connection of Big Name B with Big Name A?)
In the month and a half since I removed the affiliate from my site and (supposedly) stopped sending them traffic, Big Name B's charts show significant amounts (>10) of visitor clicks, day after day. The activity over the last month and a half is significantly greater than for the six months before.
How can I (supposedly) still be sending visitor traffic to this affiliate a month and a half after ending my association with them?
What's wrong with this picture?
Somebody copied your pages, including the affiliate codes, and has them on their site?
If they copied but left in place the affiliate codes, are they not doing me a favor? Still, no conversions, though.
Maybe people who accessed the page through Google's cache.
That doesn't explain why, since cutting ties with that affiliate, clicks have increased 3-5 times.
fake stats?
That's what I'm suspecting.
Ever noticed how Web Browsers use AUTO-COMPLETE to finish typing the URL you started entering into the location bar?
People simply start to type the URL of BigSiteA and your affiliate URL gets filled in, the user just hits the enter key since he/she doesn't really know or care wether it's your affiliate link... and there's your visits.
...or the stats are fake. :)
I think the stats are being faked. Perhaps the zero conversions were also faked.
I feel like I've been had.
I'm now much more careful about the affiliate company I keep.
virtual affilate marketing
leading to
virtual income!
Have you tried using Copyscape to check for copied pages? Just plug in the URLs for a couple of pages that used to have that affiliate's code on them.
BTW, not only have the clicks increased, but they are showing much greater variance as well.
No copying, cached pages and URL auto-completion, etc. don't fit the stats pattern--what's left to explain this but faked stats, and/or a broken stats reporting mechanism?
Thanks for mentioning Copyscape. Another neat addition to my toolbox.
But in your case I think you must be right--either fake stats or something broken in the reporting.
E-commerce firm Big Name B--the one reporting the on-line clicks and revenues stats for this affiliate--they most assuredly are big and well known.
I should add that there are other things fishy about this affiliate. For instance, to access the stats page, one just references a particular URL at Big Name B--albeit a URL with some amount of gobbledygook (a site ID, presumably). No login or password required. Security through obscurity?
