*** Stats Drama *** - a day of reckoning is coming for all sponsors...
 

I have added a bunch of server-side tracking to my outgoing links so I will be able to discover the true ratios of what is being sent to sponsors.

Fuck this busting out a calculator to find out my real ratios -- now I?ll know! No matter how I program tries to wash them in 2nd, 3rd, ?qualified? or whatever the fuck they call them?

I?ll know.

I stopped publishing my stats for a while because I believed some sponsors were showing better ratios than they deserved, while other decent sponsors might be getting thrown under the bus.

This is all about to change. I will be collecting the data for the next 30 days and will publish no-holds-barred results at the beginning of next month.

Watch out people.

good for you man, I did this a long ass time ago and was shocked at some of the results...I had to drop a few sponsors after I sent 500-1000 clicks and only "8 qualified" showed up in the admin...LOL

try it with xpays and we will be the most accurate of all your tests.

Its the only way to do stats.
Some sponsors count 1st page, others "qualified hits" that varies from 2nd page to join page hits.

Counting join page hits is useless but it make the program looks good.

damn that's fucked up jace

Will be interesting to see your results...

ADG Webmaster

Good to hear. I've been doing that for some time now too. It never ceases to amaze me how companies fuck with what constitutes as a click these days.

Yep, yep. It's a fucking joke.

I plan to get to the bottom of it.

Get em Jay!!! I am sorry to read your Cuba trip took a turn for the worst but

it would have been a success with the right guidence. Its run down and that

is an understatement but you rent a house in the coatal places and it can be

worth the trip back in time. Trust me I know I been to jail there and its a

not a place for white boys who don't speak spanish. hehe Anyway, your a

good man and your blog is kick ass!!! BT

the old brain don't work like it used to.. I finally realized that some sponsors are only counting/displaying uniques, but it's uniques sent to ALL their sites... So you could have sent a person to 20 of their sites and it counts as 1 fucking unique.

I've got allmost all my links going thru a script now and I'll be able to count clicks like that as well.. Going to be damn interesting.

Yep, I have had my programmer work out a lot of the variables like this...even niche tracking. Which is something we found out last month...not all niches are created equal, but that may just be MY traffic.

A click is a click is a click though.

it's impossible to know true ratios. plenty of programs "reverse shave". especially with whales. i guess you'll know your exact clickthrus, but that's about it.

It's too bad it has to get to that point. Maybe I should set up a hosted click tracking service for you guys to use. Would anyone use it?

bookmarked ;)

Unless you use your own shit, the service will always be open to corruption. Believe me, the extra click tracking I am doing is not only a pain in the ass, it is also using up a lot of resources on my server.

I wish a standard could be found and stuck to because all of this stats manipulation is "new school shaving" to me.

Good for you man. There are lots of affiliates that don't understand this. They assume traffic is counted the same by every sponsor program.

Good... many programs dont show 1st page hits, and some that do dont base their ratios on it. I count and show only 1st page hits.

bookmarked. bring it on

I've been doing this for a long time. I call the whole stats confusion "new shaving" even though there is nothing new about it. It just seems that programs have gotten worse with time doing it.

As you should. My ratios are still pretty good with you guys even showing the 1st page raw.

The only way to get an even playing field is for everyone to count first page raw... but then their ratios would be like 1/3k and not 1/200 or whatever... but I totally agree with you, its BS, and many do not even disclose how they count... and yes, there are far too many affiliates who do not realize they are comparing apples to oranges

I also count my own outgoing traffic with a stats system...Mine is very basic, and probably not working for your amount of traffic:) While you(or your pogrammer) is on it...I would advice an GEO IP module...Some sponsors redirect 'foreign' traffic. Better send it to a place where you get actually credit for this 'foreign' traffic...

Can't wait to see the results!

I would much rather see my first page raw clicks than any of that other bullshit sponsor use

when you don't show me first page raw and on, it doesn't allow me to properly track my campaigns and adjust them to sell better, therefor making me AND the sponsor less money

What server-side tracking did you use?

Link please..

Will be interesting to see your results for sure, I dont like all this "qualified hit" shit either

he mentioned a few times that it is something he had made up on his own

About fucking time someone did this.

Those people should be flipping burgers.

looking forward to the results:thumbsup

I think you will be stunned by the variable nature of it, including the change in what even your own paysites report as your traffic vs what you sent. To me if traffic trading had as bad tracking as paysites no one would have ever traded with scripts.

I would be interested in seeing how you code for this.
I gave up on looking at stats a long time ago.

In the end it's about how much I'm making, so if program A makes me more than program B, I really don't care what their stats say. The checks at the end of the month are my stats program ;)

Still having accurate stats would help make the decision to change sponsors a lot easiser.

There have been affiliates that have been doing this for at least 8+ years. Like the RSS feeds - some of these same guys have been doing those for 2+ years - they kept quiet about both because they didn't want others to have the same advantages they have ;)

Jay, you know I love you like an old lady loves a studmaster, but don't give the man too many fish. Webmasters need to learn to fish.

Ain't nothing wrong with teaching a man how to successfully fish, is there? :pimp

There's only so many fish.

Jay - I know of someone that did this on the tgp side - he showed me the numbers from his program and you will be amazed at your results :) - remember that the first response you are going to get from sponsors when you confront them about the difference is that they dont count partial page loads :1orglaugh

I can't wait to see how the Politburo here will discredit your data.

I did the same thing a long time ago and this is why I run my own paysites now. I got tired of getting my ass shaved.

Bonne Chance.

This thread reminds me of a convo I had about 4 years ago with a program I was pushing.

Me: Hey man, what's up with sales? I'm seeing that my ratios have tripled this month

Program: Yeah, sorry about that. Don't worry, we are working on something that will make your ratios look really good next month.

LOL

Ray

Jay don't you send a majority of your traffic to your own program?

DH

oh yeah - if ppl start publishing join page ratios every program does 1:10 suddenly, 2nd page unique or raw 1st page is all that matters

plus you could send 5k to the 1st page and end up with 2 clicks on the joinpage - so: bookmarked :)