NATS stats weirdness
 

OK, I just dumped one NATS sponsor where I had a horrendously bad sales ratio (as mentioned earlier in this thread) but now I've signed up with a new sponsor that does the exact same thing the old one did that makes my "bogosity" meter go into the red.

On the standard NATS stats interface, you get a breakdown by "raw," "unique," "signups,: etc. and then on the right side is "Break down by: site, program, campaign."

I've only been promoting this sponsor since the 2nd. I had 3 hits under "unique" each day for the first two days. I can click that numeral "3" for each day and get the referring FHG urls that sent the traffic to the tour. And when I click the "Break down by site" link, I get the two sites I was promoting, and the 3 total hits. So far so good.

But as of today, the "unique" hits show 33 hits so far. Wow! My links must be doing really well! But when I click the "33" under unique, it only shows 2 referring URLs with 1 hit each. Hmmm.

Ah but now, when I click the "break down by site" link I get a list of hits to a bunch of sites that I'm not promoting and didn't even know were in the program! Where the hell is that coming from?

The NATS system of the aforementioned first sponsor was doing the exact same thing. And now I suspect that I was really only sending that sponsor 1/20th of the actual hits the sponsor claimed I was sending. Why would a sponsor do this? All it does is make my sales ratio look 100 times worse than it actually might be - and that's supposed to encourage me to promote them? Rather the opposite, since I dropped Sponsor #1 like a hot potato when I looked at my end-of-year stats.

Most of my other NATS-using sponsors appear to give me accurate, or at least believeable, data.

Can anyone explain what's going on with this? Obviously the NATS folks themselves aren't gonna do it, and I'd like to get some perspective on this before I contact the new sponsor.

[Edit: I did ICQ the rep for sponsor #1 about this issue a few days ago, but they haven't seen fit to reply yet. So I guess I can mention that it's PanchoDog. |pissed| ]

Allow me to take a moment to applaud Exclusively4Affiliates' decision to discontinue the use of NATS and return to being a great amateur paysite program. Thank you Mark. |thumb

E4A email notice:
BTW Mark - I'm an idiot and just re-signed up through CCBill even though I already have a pre-NATS CCBill account with you. I was so excited I only read the part to your email. |loony|

While part of me is glad that they did this, part of me is pissed because I think this is the 4th (maybe 5th) processing/admin/linkcode move/change in the last 3 or 4 years.

That sucks big time. BIG TIME. But being that your last set of stats had them at 0:12556, I'm betting this move will prove to be a good thing.

I didn't really want to get into that stuff, but I pulled their links after that last stats run.

I remember signing up to promote them years ago. They then moved to a new admin, so I swapped the link codes. They then did it again (might have gone back to the 1st one) so I just pulled the links. Then they moved to CCBill & Mark asked me to sign up again. When I asked if they planned on changing admins in the future, he told me about going to NATS, so I waited until that was released before I signed up.

So now I'm back to doing this a lot |huh

Wow, it's gonna be a real bitch when they move to MPA3 in a few months. :D

I'm not sure if this would help you out now or not, you may already know this, but for those that don't here is a little bit of php code that might come in helpful:

header("Location: http://www.yahoo.com");
?>

Save the above code in a text editor like notepad, name it and give it a .php extension.

Upload to your server.

(first change yahoo.com to your appropiate link code for that particular sponsor)


Now you can link to files like this for all your sponsors.

If the sponsor goes down, changes link codes, doesn't perform any more, whatever may happen, all you have to do is edit that one file to a new link code or new sponsor.

This is good idea for tgp gallery submitters that have 100's of thousands of pages and want to change a link code and not alter the original page and set off any TGP owners alarms.

You can also use php ads or similar scripts but I find this more simple and you can use it on as many domains as you want. :D

You've never run a link list :D I've got 20K total links in 130 different categories. I don't know the exact number of paysites, but I am activly promoting 200+ sponsor programs, so a simple include file isn't gonna help.

It's not an include. At this point, with 200+ sponsors, it would be total pain in the cock to set up, but probably worth it. You create a separate file for each PAYSITE, named for that paysite. (Yes, a lot of work for someone as established as you.)
Let's say the one for Wet Wifey MILF is called wet-wifey-milf.php. The file itself would look like this:
Instead of linking directly to wet-wifey-milf.com on your pages, you link to wet-wifey-milf.php. Then, whenever the link code gets changed to wet-wifey-milf.com, you only have to change it on the wet-wifey-milf.php.

All that little php page does is redirect the surfer to the correct page. They never realize that they've been to wet-wifey-milf.php. It's a good tecnique for free site and gallery builders.

I'm sorta sorry I mentioned this whole E4A thing as this point. :(

I used the wrong terminology - I do understand what he meant :)

But fuck me, even if I was starting out from scratch, 4000+ active paysite links (I shudder to think of the number that I've removed over the years) would be a pain in the ass as well.

It's not that bad pulling links - just a simple search in the admin for some common text/numbers & then I can delete them rather easily. It's when the link codes change that it becomes a pain in the ass with pulling the database & doing it by hand...which is pretty much the same as that php thingy that is apparently not an "include" :D

And don't be sorry - I'll just kick you in the shin the next time I see you & we'll be even |thumb

Anyone have any hard data on whether there'd be any SE benefit to having those 4,000+ paysite links pointing to pages on your own server instead of pointing off-site to the paysite urls directly?

I think most spiders notice that the php links get instantly redirected, so probably not.

For the love of |buddy| we are really off topic - lol

I might have to go thru this thread, drag out the legit questions & start a "Attn: NATS Rep: Please Answer These Questions" thread.

yes, same as all your CCBill links. You might as well create 2000 inbound links to your own domains and create your your own link popularity for your own domains rather than CCBill or other sponsors.


Say you had 10 or whatever domains set up for all different niches or however you wanted to do it.

Would be much better, but I agree starting now would be a task but it's never too late to start, and it's clearly a no brain-er win win situation afterwards.

This is an extremely interesting thread that I missed before. :)

Greenie, did you ever publish your list of pre and post NATS?

I never published them because there were only 2 or 3 sposnors that I had a decent amount of before & after data for (and those were pretty much the same)

But I can go thru some now, like Meat Cash would be a great one for me to compare.

Any other ideas? Who else did Dee Cash buy up where I'd have 6 months of Nats stats to go with my pre-nats numbers.

Meatcash. Oh how I loved you so.

As Grennie well knows, the day Meatcash changed to NATS my stats plummeted. My belief was and still is, that this is because from day1 of their NATS install they moved to a 1 hour cookie life. They had always been good to me, up until they realized how much more money they could make by taking away my return sales. The surfers I introduced to their product that came back after the 1 hour cookie had died off.

I believe I lost 90% of my sales and eventually income as the rebills died off from that one paradigm shift. :(

Of course now I've heard that Dee has cancelled production on most of their sites now and rebills are declining as well.

Given those factors, maybe Meatcash isn't that great a choice of comparison. |huh

My comparison would be just ratios & on a site-by-site basis.

If you guys can do the research, I'll write the paper - give me a list to work with!

Hmm. As a preliminary here are some programs deecash seems to have bought.

http://badgirlbucks.com
E*** Cash (Greenie know who I mean)
http://jasonandalex.com/index.php
http://extremepaychecks.com/
http://triplexcash.com/
http://ragecash.com/
http://elitedollars.com/ (I think?)
http://nichedsites.com/
http://nats.badgirlbucks.com/
http://mayorsmoney.com/
http://joinrightnow.com/ (long LONG ago this was a ccbill program)


I'm sure there are MANY more. :D But I guess we need to start somewhere. You are looking only for ones which were ccbill before and went to nats or just switched to nats from whatever?

I'm not looking for just Dee Cash sites - I'll do some homework when I get home - I'm due for a stats run anyway :)

My sales for Rage Cash actually increased post-NATS - which I was pleasantly surprised about after reading some stories as to what could be done with NATS numbers and cookie life.

I thought Rage Cash was launched with NATS. |huh

No, they used partnersoft until dee bought them and switched them to nats.

Twistys just switched to nats, but that's been very recent. Probably too recent for you to compare yet.

No Im pretty sure when Dee bought them and Extreme paychecks it switched to NATS..I could be wrong though

Wow - this just pissed me off, because I just built a site promoting Meat Cash |cry|

I started pushing CCBill sponsors because of this board and it was a good decision for sure.

Fucking great. I just added all of their sites to my banner rotator something like a week ago. Now I need to waste some more time to remove them |pokefun| |banghead|

I've decided that with future stats runs I'll be adding yet ANOTHER column that will contain my pre-Nats ratios for programs that switched over.

When that next run will be is up in the air, as I need to finish some other projects 1st.

I think it may be time to start a new thread about cookie lifetimes used by various sponsors. Maybe we can come up with a big list of sponsor names and how long their cookies live before expiring. That's something that could be valuable to a webmaster deciding on which sponsor programs to start promoting. It could also be valuable to webmasters who are already affiliates of particular sponsors, but have no idea how the sponsors handle their cookies. Might even be worth adding as a column to the current sponsor info available in the sponsors list on this board.

Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a message that differs between sponsors who use 255-day cookies (the max CCBill allows) and those who use things like 1-hour cookies. Seriously, is there any reason to use short cookies besides depriving a webmaster of an earned commission as early as possible?

If a webmaster sends someone to a tour and he gets interrupted by something before he can join but goes back later, or tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or whenever, I think the original webmaster who sent that surfer deserves a commission if he was the last affiliate who sent that surfer to the sponsor's tour.

All traffic has some cost and therefore some value, even if only the time and work that went into building the pages or writing the posts which originally convinced the surfer to visit the tour page. Short cookies seem to say that the sponsor doesn't believe our traffic has much value to them. Which makes me think it may not be a very good idea to send our traffic to them either.

Anyone else feel it's time we called out the sponsors who use shorties?



.

So what I'm hearing is that during a default install of NATS, you get a 1 hour cookie expiration. I started promoting MeatCash post NATS and was doing great until they got bought out. My sales went to shit, but I'd like to believe it was due to them not updating their tour during the transition.

Yes me :)

No, I believe that the default is 10 days because that is what most of my sponsors have. Another sponsor I have is set to only 3 days, but them and Meatcash were the only 2 I had below the standard 10 days.

I think it is a great idea as well.

I like to use http://web-sniffer.net/ to check cookies but there are other ways as well.

Your point about the reason for using a smaller cookie is well taken. One thing I have learned over the years is to look for little signs from sponsors to see if they respect me as an affiliate and to check if they seem to be doing everything possible to take my money. Little things like this indicate their philosophy when it comes to affiliates. These little things often say quite a bit. :)

Well, I was going to ask how you can tell what the duration of a cookie is but I guess that's been answered...

Simon, I actually was thinking the same thing along these lines. I'd like to know what programs use in regards to cookie life. As I myself feel that it reflects greatly with the number of sales, and probably has a lot more to do with low numbers than some much more easy to point the finger at scenarios. And even though the scenarios are surely to blame for some lack of sales, Im sure cookie life is a key part as well.

Do programs usually keep that info in their terms & conditions section? If not, there should be an open invite for program owners/reps to provide that information.

That websniffer is scaring the hell out of me.

I just put in some recent affiliate links. OUCH.

I know, tell me about it. :(

A few days ago here Ccbill Paul said they will consider adding display of the cookie length setting in the ccbill lounge on a per-program basis:

http://www.greenguysboard.com/board/...56&postcount=5

I hope they do. It would make it much easier to monitor.

Forgive my total newbie question but Twisty's just switched over to NATS recently.Does that mean I have to pull all my pre-NATS hosted galleries and change all my free site link codes etc. or should I be ok?|confused|

Hey Star Man. Not a stupid question. You don't need to change them we have taken care of everything so it will redirect and still track but we always recommend switching over to the new codes. Hit me up if you have any questions. ICQ: 215-457-848 or Kevin at Twistys dot com.

question I just ran that web sniffer on an affiliate link of mine and it shows 3 cookie rows, 2 of them show cookies expire today at 6pm, is that what I am reading?
example:

Set-Cookie: x_wm_login=buttster1; expires=Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:00:19 GMT
Set-Cookie: x_sub=deleted; expires=Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:54:18 GMT
Set-Cookie: x_ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fweb-sniffer.net%2F; expires=Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:00:19 GMT