I think this situation needs a disclaimer. It presumes that poor ratios are the sponsor's fault, and does not take into account affiliates who
[i] don't understand what they are promoting [ii] list sites in unproductive categories [iii] throw a bunch of gagging midget tgp traffic at a foot fetish site.

If we could eliminate the politics, posturing and chest thumping, I think that we could all put those energies to better use- learning as much as we can about our products and our customers.

I actually thought about this as I was planning the version 2 of porngreen. I came up with the following, but it's probably not for programs who wish to use refer.ccbill.com links or have 0 knowledge on coding and whatnot..

I have something like
http://www.mypaysites.com/tour1/inde...ur_ccbill_code

Then on the tour, I carry that code in the links until the joinpage where I send the ccbill_referer (ref in the url) to the ccbill's page. Now, the obvious problem with this is that no cookie is set, so webmasters would be screwed over for returning customers. However, I also have an iframe on the indexpage of the tour that is linked to a blank page through refer.ccbill.com with the affiliates link. So that sets the cookie.

On the joinpage I have php code that checks for the presence of 'ref' value in the url, so if there's nobody who sent the visitor it uses the cookie.

What this does, and yes I've tested it, is that affiliates can continue to check their clicks through affiliateadmin as well as my own stats, they get credit for returning customers and the person who sent the last visitor gets credit for the sale.

Not sure I made any sense, but this is the way to do it so the last referer gets credit IF there is a referer, otherwise the webmaster whose link set the cookie gets credit. It's a bit 'hard' way of doing it, but it was pretty much the only way I could figure out how to do that. As far as I know my plan is rather foolproof. Prove me wrong and I'll fix it. :)

I personally chose to have all my sites under one master account (merged), just because I don't want people having to sign-up for 14 sites when they want to promote all my sites. As an affiliate, I also prefer that. If a sponsor has 5 sites, and I'd like to promote 3 of them, it's annoying to sign up 3 times. I'd rather sign-up just once and figure out my own way to track traffic rather than sign-up multiple times..but I'm retarded like that.

Also, if someone signs up to my affiliate program because he/she wants to promote site A, but has sites B-M as options as well, without having to re-signup.. I, as a sponsor, am more likely to see some odd hits to those sites as well. Also it is less confusing for the 'non-experienced' webmaster. If they choose to use my FHG/HFS import tool and it has galleries they haven't signed up for, I get immediately called a cheater and whatnot. Even if it's the affiliates fault for trying to import galleries he hasn't signed up for, then he comes to boards and asks why he doesn't get credit for this and that. Easier to have 1 affiliate id which gives credit for everything. No messing around.

Also, I have asked CCBill, and you can't (or atleast couldn't) track individual sub-account traffic if the accounts were merged. This was one of the reasons I chose to have my own stats coded so affiliates could track individual site performance, and still just sign-up once...My info may be outdated though.

Not really. You should be looking at individual sites in the program & not the entire program when it comes to what you're going to promote. If you have no idea what the individual sites are doing & the ratios for the entire program are bad (for whatever reason - and the reason is not important in this discussion) then you will probably not promote the program.

But, if you can look at the individual site stats, you might see that some are converting really bad & some are converting really good. Then you just drop the bad ones & continue to promote the good ones.

By not having multiple sites on sub-accounts in CCBill, the webmaster has no idea what's making sales & what's not, so in all likelihood, they will just drop the program.

I sorta understood it :)

You don't have to do that - that's why they have the sub-accounts. So for you, it'd be:
924961-0000
924961-0001
924961-0002
etc
Then each site has a sub-account & you & the webmaster can see which sites made sales.

Ahh.. that, yes. I do that..but I thought you ment CLICK tracking, not sales tracking. I'm pretty sure that if the accounts are merged, all hits show up under the account 0000 (and you can't change the sub-account in refer.ccbill.com links, it doesn't work like that. Or atleast didn't in 2003/04 when I asked about it).

Yeah - that's one thing I really wish CCBill would add - count clicks for the sub accounts instead of just the total that defaults to the 0000 account when you go & look at individual sales.

I'm glad to see you're doing some stats outside of ccbill, that's really been needed for some time now..

I don't like the iframe idea though. As an affiliate, I would send to the tour via the ccbill link. That also helps to build the trust factor as opposed to just trusting that you won't change something on your tour or that it breaks etc.

eg:

h ttp://refer.ccbill.com/cgi-bin/clicks.cgi?CA=xxxxxx&PA=XXXXXX&HTML=http://www.mypaysites.com/tour1/index.php?ref=your_ccbill_code

Have you confirmed that there's a timed out lockout on changing the cookie? It's become fairly common practice.. For example, topbucks has something like a 1 minute lockout or something like that.

I think the program can set whatever time frame they want for the cookies.

Feel free to do that if you'd want. BUT, I also made a consious decision to not use refer.ccbill.com links. It's rare, but the refer.ccbill.com server has been down for several hours, when the signup page of ccbill is not. What this means is that refer.ccbill.com links do NOT work, even though customers could sign-up. But as I said, nobody says you can't link like that. I personally don't see the point.

..also, if you think you're "safe" from tricks if you send via refer.ccbill.com links, you couldn't be more wrong. No matter what software, what kind of links, whatever the program is using there's a way to shave sales. Nats, mpa2/3, ccbill, whatver..all of these can be shaved with. Sorry if I broke your dreams of honesty, but if there's will there's a way, as sad as that is.

Example. Just place random ccbill_referer value in the joinpage. CCBill uses the passed value before the cookie. So doesn't matter if you sent your hit via refer.ccbill.com, if the paysite is crooked and changed the ccbill_referer value on their joinpage, you lose the sale.

You can't even check it. You can always go to the tour:
http://hairytriangle.com/tour1/index.php?ref=1234567 for example and see the sourcecode, go to the ccbill page and see if it's there, if it's on the source of my iframe on the indexpage etc..but how do you know the program keeps the joinpage static? They could use crontabs or something to keep the joinpage 'clean' 22 hours of the day, and for 2 hours they replace all codes with yours.. you'd never know if you didn't happen to check it just then... how sad is that?

No way to be sure.

*chuckle*.. yeah I wasn't actually saying that a program still couldn't fuck affiliates out of the sale, I'm well aware of all the tricks that one can pull... However, to the unwashed masses, it can at least communicate a "desire" to be trustworthy etc. If the program/person is a somewhat well known entity, then it's not really an issue.

But I've got one program that has done something similar and I simply don't trust them. Not because I think they're crooked, but more that they're not very technical and their sites often have "stupid" problems with them. So by linking thru the ccbill link, I should be able to still get the sale even if they screw up their code.

I've been told that Sparky has helped Emma take care of this problem |thumb