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Erk.. I guess I'm the "Phil" Pete mentioned. ;)
He was slightly mistaken, and I'll elaborate, but the point remains that cookies are a stupid way to track surfers (as in it being the ONLY way). *IF* CCbill tracks IP, and of course does cookies, and allows the referral code to be put in the pages, then my hat goes off to them. This is the first I've heard about IP tracking though, I always wondered why sponsors didn't use it but perhaps I was wrong in that assumption. Is there any information about ccbill's IP tracking? How long do they retain IP address "memory", what happens if a surfer comes from two different affiliates, etc. etc. Be very cool if it was indeed turned on by default.
Anyways. the 30% figure is about right from what I can tell about surfers with cookies disabled. I wrote a real quicky gallery tracking program that basically lets me see which links on galleries get clicks, which referrer sent the most hits to a specific gallery, which has the most productive traffic, etc.
Every single surfer viewing the gallery gets a cookie (attampted) to set. Then the total of "views" is updated along with the referrer counts.
If they click on a link, it goes to an out.cgi type redirector, which reads the cookie and does some backend work, etc.
Basically for every 100 surfers I attempt to set a cookie on, I have roughly 30 who it fails. (that actually click out, there is no way to tell if your cookie is "accepted" other than trying to read it).
So around 30% of all my "click out" traffic is NOCOOKIE, and for the gallery I tested the software with was to iBill, which *only* tracks by cookies. So if any of those 30% signed up, I didn't get credit.
I have no idea what the ratio is for "missed signups", but that 30% of surfers with cookies disabled absolutely stunned me. I figured it would be around 1-2%.
this is TGP traffic, so the "average" surfer is probably more technicaly apt, and has been surfing porn for a while. you make your own assumptions.
-Phil
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