Affiliate program related question
 

Hello everyone.

I've been wondering about something regarding affiliate programs for a long time.

Whenever you sign up to a affiliate program, you receive a set of link codes for the different sites the affiliate program has to offer. But why not let the affiliate add his domains manually, and then link all sales from this domain to the respective affiliate?

When using this method you can give your affiliate pr-domain statistics and conversion rates. Also, the affiliate can link directly to the actual domain instead of going through a long (and ugly) CC-bill (example) url.

This method permanently removes the need for annoying (and jscript-requiring) mouseover status bar changes to hide the real URL.

The bad things when using this method is to rely 100% on the browser to send a proper HTTP_REFERER on each request. Also, the user must _always_ come from another website. It will not be possible to use this method on e-mails and such.

But hey, in 95% of the cases linking codes within emails will be spam?

I coded an affiliate program using this method earlier this year, and we released the beta at May 1 this year. I had concerns that using the new method would create some flaws, but it has worked excellent. All sales made throughout the site has been reflected properly in our affiliate system. In addition, we created an affiliate account for ourselves, added our network sites, to try monitoring sales from our internal sites. We are very pleased with our results, we can now see detailed results from each of our sites, including conversion rates.

We now see that we have a 1:11 conversion rate (not regular adult) from our main site, and a 1:85 conversion rate on traffic from other sites. We really like how it works and being able to see detailed statistics on a pr-domain-basis. For our case, this has been _very_ useful.

Why isn't this implemented in any regular adult affiliate programs? I'm sure it exists, although I've never ever seen it anywhere. Would you use it? If not - why?

Please discuss, this should be somewhat interesting to all of you!

:)

Interesting, but the average webmaster doesn't want to dedicate a domain to a single sponsor, and if I understand your post, that is what it would take.

Well, no.

I don't understand how you reached that conclusion :)

why? :helpme

OK. re-read it. Makes more sense now. I was thinking it worked on the affiliates end but I guess multiple sponsors can receive traffic from the same domain and obviously just monitor their traffic.

Don't mind me, I've been up all night :thumbsup

Why not take a domain, make a redirect from it to any sponsorsite you want. Same thing as far as I understood.. then you wouldn't have to hide nasty linking urls.

..or did I misunderstand something?

But that, implies what "enter" wrote earlier. One domain for each sponsor. Err, one domain for each sponsors individual site. Sounds like a lot of unecessary domains when the affiliate program can do the work instead :)

My first bump ever. I feel bad.

Isn't there a lot of experienced webmasters here with any opinions on why this is good or bad?

C'mon.