[cd34]

Its also possible that the sponsors you are using are counting 2nd page clicks rather than first page clicks. Or are counting Uniques and you are counting Raw.

On a 2nd Page click, the surfer hits the first page, but is not counted until they move off that page. Its supposed to be more accurate because popping the page in a console that is closed immediately isn't a surfer that will have made an attempt to buy, therefore its not counted. Or so the theory goes.

Counting Raw versus Unique is another thing that is done. If you send the same IP to the tour 10 times, it would be counted as 1 Unique hit. Since there was only 1 IP address, only 1 click is counted. Obviously there are issues with AOL's proxy server setup where multiple surfers do appear to come from one IP.

Its also possible that you have encoded your links and they are not passing all of the arguments. If your clickout script is something like:

/cgi-bin/clickout.cgi?url=http://www.site.com/refer.cgi?variable=1&tour=2

When your cgi script reads the variable url, depending on how your code is written, it could chop things off at the first ? or the &. You might verify it by printing the URLs rather than redirecting and testing to make sure the parameters are going through as expected. Then, you can play with URL encoding your links so that things are being passed through.