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Scrubbing may be a problem, but I think affiliate code tracking and click tracking is a far greater problem. When Joining any ccbill Sponsor these days I always ride the tours to the join page then search for my affiliate code in the source. In every case the sponsors links that are supplied by ccbill track and many times the hosted ones do not carry your affiliate code and as a result you do not get paid. I'm not calling the majority of sponsors or CCBILL cheats here just pointing out that when you take a close look at what you are linking too your chances of making any $$$ are made even slimmer by affiliate code problems.
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Mornin' everyone,
I noticed this thread because I've seen scrubbing become a real problem at times too, although I'd say that in general we
don't have as much trouble with CCBill scrubs compared to some others we've used.
But we
do use CCBill in our webmaster program, and one thing I really want to comment on here is about the affiliate code not being carried all the way to the join page at times. This was a personal peeve of mine for a long time, and it was one thing we wanted to see if we could improve on a little with our own webmaster affiliate program and with our (soon to come) Hosted Free Sites.
We think we're doing it a good way now on our tours, where the initial link to us begins by setting a CCBill cookie
before the surfer even sees the warn page (or whatever tour page the webmaster wishes to target). We do that in the background with php, and you often won't even see anything happen. But if you check that you don't have a cookie from CCBill named 925611 (our account) before you enter our tour, you'll definitely have one as soon as you do.
From that point on there's no need to carry the code forward to our join page since the cookie already exists long before that.
Yes, if a surfer has a 'no-cookie' browser, or surfs with cookies disabled, they're not going to get tagged, but surfers who disable cookies (and/or Javascript) in their browser aren't usually our best candidates for membership -- particularly since CCBill (and others) require those capabilities to even process a signup.*
In our HFS, we'll be using another method to "bury" the webmaster's affiliate code in the URL (a big thank you to swedguy for help with that one!), because we don't want to see the code easily snipped off the end like happens a lot. With this method we're really hoping to see lots of our HFS appear in search engine listings eventually with the webmaster's code right where it should be.
I didn't mean to help hijack this thread to talk about webmaster affiliate code tracking instead of shaving, but the mention of CCBill and hosted promotions not tracking just kind of pulled my trigger this morning. ::grin::
Simon
* Note: I wonder if it would be worth it to identify the no-cookie/no-javascript surfers, and send them someplace other than tours where the join pages require those functions?