Forum Moderators: skibum
I use several ad agencies, all very high quality legit players in the market, so I have no real worries about their reporting, and they also all reasonably agree with each other as to how many adverts are served.
However, the server logs differ significantly from the ad reports - sometimes as much as a five fold difference in traffic numbers, even after I filter out all the junk from the reports.
I wondered if the server logs could be corrupted, but it seems difficult to see how - and analysis of them does not suggest anything nasty there.
Equally, they do not throw up any serious issues such as agressive spiders or particuarly high usages from specific IP ranges that might be cloacked spiders.
I also installed a seperate tracking bot on the site - initially using a 1x1 gif, which matched the advert reports, but when I switched from the gif to an SSI call, then the reports came closer to the server logs.
Now, knowing that 1x1 gifs are often blocked by ad blockers and privacy freaks as tracking gifs - and that the gif based reports are a close match for the ad reports...
....I begin to wonder just how many people use ad blockers, and if that is the reason for the discrepancy.
Research tells me that Firefox is good at blocking ads - but its market share just isn't big enough to show this large a discrepency.
Also, I understand that Norton Anti-virus now comes with ad blockers, and there are probably a lot more users of that than Firefox - but still, a fivefold difference in ads served to pages?
Frankly, a doubling of ads served - let alone a five fold increase would be amazing for my site income/holiday plans, so I do want to try and resolve this.
I am also about to start offering a subscription service, one of the benefits being an ad free version of the site - and if so many people are blocking adverts, then I wish to "encourage" them to pay up (either by viewing ads, or using a credit card).
Yes, I know I will upset some readers, but frankly - my site has few significant competitors (we are generally considered to be in the top 5 for quality in the industry) and I am not too worried about losing all my traffic to other sites, just some of it.
Does anyone have any thoughts about this?
Thanky
It doesn't take long for something like that to affect the industry. Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, said that technology would double every 18 months or so. What I've found is that means that computers are virtually obsolete after 3 years. (tech has doubled twice) and almost useless at 4.5 years. Figure about 20% of the seriously used computers are getting replaced each year.
I think that the affiliate programs such as CJ, LS an d Amazon have been slow to react to both parasites and ad blockers. AM gets squeezed from both sides.
Some humble suggestions (Keep in mind I'm hardly earning anything at this point on affiliate marketing. It's a sideline to my regular business and I just started addressing the parasite/blocker issues)
1. Take a look at your sites from machines running various ad blockers, especially norton. Are your ads showing and are the links working?
2. If you come across a parasite infected machine. Try taking a look at your sites there to see the affect.
3. Look into some of the link cloaking techniques. Usually it is a php app that will show one link on the screen. This is one that the ad blockers won't block. Then when the user clicks, the app translates it into the proper affiliate links with something like a lookup table. I've found that will usually get you past norton.
4. Don't use folder names with ad or ads or anything similar
5. Most of the links provided by one of the affiliates I use are useless. They will be blocked by norton. I end up running the links through a click counter to mask them
6. Look into running something like andrew clover's parasite script.
Hope this helps a little. It's mostly a rehash of other stuff I found here at WebmasterWorld.
chris
