Affiliate stats... ideas wanted
 

Are there any specific features you'd like your affiliate stats to have that are not out there now? Give me your ideas...

something that tells the affiliate which URLs sent what traffic and how that specific traffic converted. preferably offer the ability to use unique codes for each page the affiliate puts your code on. like

www.shiteatingfetish.com/?affid=Foo&page=Bar

Word.

But not only unique code per page, but per link. I'd like to not only be able to gauge the success-level of individual sites/pages, but also link placement within the page.

Details like time of sign-up would also be useful.

Thanks for your serious responses.... any other unique features you'd like in an affiliate program?

Customizability...

For example, the ability to use (and NOT use) the same url for webmaster referral that is used for normal traffic clickthroughs.

Traffic quality analysis- just brainstorming here, feel free to ignore:

Create a cookie standard for traffic types, and encourage affiliates to register as pushing a particular type of traffic- and give them a script / urlcodes to log on their referrers. If this became ubiquitous the cookies chains could get really long.

You could take the cookies and find out if the traffic was chainsurfer, se, mainstream once removed, as well as what genre are compatible in generating signups...

fnet, you can't pass cookies between domains... at least, not as a cookie, you can pass the info in the URL. Cookies are only sent back to the domain that sent them, or to any domains within the domain specified when the cookie was set. Ie, you can set a cookie on images.yourdomain.com with a domain value of "yourdomain.com" and it will be sent back along with every request to "yourdomain.com", where as the default action would be to only send it back with requests to "images.yourdomain.com". I tried once setting the domain to ".com", but that didn't work.

IGallery's new Truestats install has support for "xcodes" or 'Traffic Source Labels' which allow you to differentiate your traffic by link, but I'm not sure if their documentation discusses it. You'll see this feature on Truecash soon! :)

Threads like this are always an intresting read to someone who's written several affiliate programs...