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Here is an interesting little story:
I started with a new sponsor recently. I didn't really do much with them, but by chance my link code ended up as the #1 search term for their main site's name. It stayed like that for 2 weeks or so, and generated about 500 hits per day... averaging about 1 signup per day (I love free money like this).
About a week ago, this finally dropped off as google shook things up, I guess.
Anyway, I decided that any sponsor that converts at 1 in 500 these days is worth a little shot of other traffic, so I put up some banners, text links, and partial page ads in some pretty good place. Please understand, I use a banner rotator for all of my stuff, and I track the clickouts pretty closely (I track views / clicks on a per banner location per site for all my sites owned). I tossed about 5000 views at a mix of their partial page ads (rotated 3 of them) and let it run for a couple of days.
I had a click out rate aa bit over 5% or about 250-280 clicks. The sponsor counted exactly 11 clicks.
I checked the link codes twice, three times... they are correct. They are exactly the same. The link code tracks all the way to the end of the process (right to the signup page) - but they don't count that many clicks.
Now I am starting to wonder: How many hits was google really generated? Based on this, it must have been generating closer to 10k hits per day.
Needless to say, this sponsor is going to have a VERY short lifespan on my rotation (it's almost over already).
Alex
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