Well I was hoping John would come back to this thread as he promised, but it doesn't look like that is the case so I guess I'll just post my findings.
Keep in mind, this is
my theory as to why my personal ratios plummeted after a sponsors switch to NATS. I wish I had done some pre-NATS testing, but as we all know hindsight is 20/20. I have tested the
time to live on the cookies that my link codes insert at three seperate times from three different links (both old and new) to three different paysites in their program. Each time my cookie expired within
55 minutes.
Now it's easy to say that if you can't make a sale in 55 minutes, then you're not going to make the sale at all, but apparently according to my pre-NATS stats (with a longer cookie life I would presume) as compared to my post-NATS maybe I was selling after those 55 minutes. A great theory on this is that maybe I was selling on type-ins because my freesites were so fucking awesome as compared to the crappy freesites they saw after mine, that the surfer just had to go back to the site I was selling for and donate my commission to me.
All joking aside the majority of my inbounds and also my sales to that sponsor were from "no referrer" prior to NATS. Was it type in traffic or did their old stats just suck? You tell me. What I can tell you is that as of right now I am at 1:7241.
And while I love the people at the program and enjoyed working with their sites and their content, I just can't justify continued traffic directed to ratios that bad. All of my scripted links have been deactivated, the hardcoded links are being removed as I update my pages, and I'm no longer building freesites or mini-hubs with their links/content.
In the short term they may have saved on my commssion on a few sales, but in the long term they will be losing a good source of steady targetted traffic.
