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I have detected several accounts being used to the same sponsor, looks like some sort of rotation. Who knows they all could be them and they spread out their sales incase 1 or 2 accounts gets banned they still get paid on the other ones. I did notice one of the account names was 180solutions, so i would think that is most likely their account.
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Those, in most likelihood, are
not all affiliate IDs belonging to 180Solutions. I think Missie mentioned from Ben's report 176 IDs for them found. That information in Ben's report has been widely misunderstood. Those were 176 IDs (or however many it was) he found coming through their software for BF, LS, CJ and PFX. All most all of those IDs belonged to affiliates who were running ads through 180Solutions software and not 180Solutions themselves.
Even when an affiliate just uses their affiliate link as the pop up URL so all I really have is an unknown aff id, I'd say 85% of the time I'm eventually able to track down who really belongs to that ID.
And it's usually not 180Solutions. Even when you see tags referencing 180 in the URL, many times it's just the affiliate using a parameter to track the traffic source for their own internal stats.
The problem would be much easier to control if all those Ids did belong to 180 themselves. But when it's a revolving door of any affiliate with $50 being able to open an account with 180 and run campaigns, it's entirely different beast to monitor.
IMO, 180 has intentionally severely cut back on what they are doing as an affiliate themselves. If you read the 180Solutions Advertiser TOS (you got to dig on their site to find it), you'll get a clue. The upshot, and I'm definitely paraphrasing here, is that if the shit ever does hit the fan from a legal standpoint it's the advertiser using their service and not them who is responsible. Their stance seems to be along the line of what the P2P apps did. They just provide the technology and their advertisers not them who is responsible for how it's being used.
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So if the surfer has such a program installed (whether they are aware of it or not), then any link appearing in their browser with the target keywords (whether typed in, click from affiliate1's link, redirect with affiliate1000's link etc.), the person bidding on the keyword would always get the sale credit.
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Well not 100% of the time. They have alogrithms and timers built into the software for when an ad will pop and what ad will pop. I won't necessarily get a pop up every test just because a kw is being bid on. They also allow day targeting now, so an advertiser can stipulate certain hours of the day they want their ads to pop. A very rough estimate is about 5 minutes has to pass before another pop up will happen for the same kw trigger. But again there are many factors that come into play. Neverless, it can be a significant impact.
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yes they do. It is the nature of how cookies work. When you come to my website and click a link to my sponsor it sets a cookie on your computer. If you were to edit that cookie you will see information there, like my account code, etc. Now when zango pops under a window that sets a cookie to the same site, if you go back to your cookies folder and open the same cookie, you see their affiliate info there. Whatever you want to call it, my cookie is altered, deleted, replaced, what the hell ever, it is gone and their cookie is there.
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What happens to the cookie is correct, but Zango software didn't do it. The affiliate Network changed the IDs. Because that's the way affiliate networks track. If you did the same thing except clicked on an affiliate link from another web site, you'd see the same thing with the cookie. Is that just semantics? Maybe, but it's a very important distinction from a legal standpoint. And again from how Zango is able to publicly defend their business practices. Because to say Zango themselves altered the cookie is factually not correct from a very technical standpoint. What is accurate however is that whatever affiliate that ID belonged to used Zango's software to exploit the affiliate tracking system to record their 'click' when no actual true end user physical click happened. And Zango's software and business facilitates such exploitation. And last time I checked Affiliate Marketing is still performance based, so that true physical click is key in a performance based model. All that doesn't mean you weren't scooped out of your sale.