Iframing Explained

I have had this question asked a few times in the past few days so I thought maybe this thread would help a few confused people out.


Try and visualize...

An iframe can be thought of as a window on your web page. So now you have your regular web page but a portion of it has an open window where another web page can be seen in that window. You can determine how big that window is, where it is located on your webpage and of course you can determine what site can be viewed in that window.

Another way to think of it is you have two web pages stacked on top of each other, one on top and one that is being covered. On the top web page you can cut out a portion of the page so that the page underneath shows through that area.

So What?

Ok, so what does this have to do with CPA. Well a lot of people use the idea of the iframe to frame an offer. If your offer is a small box, you can literally have that offer framed on your own web site. So if my web site is kenster.com, I can cut out a portion of my site and put the offer as if its right on my site. If the user goes to kenster.com and fills out the offer (say an email submit), then it is literally like they went to my affiliate link and filled out the offer, yet in reality my domain never changed on their window. You can probably begin to see why framing gets abused by blackhatters now!


Now, why can this be a huge help. Well there is something called 100% framing. This is the same concept but instead of cutting out a small window, the whole page is a window. So the "top page" is essentially blank and all you see is the underlying page. Now why would you want this? Well, you can imagine how some people visit affiliate links and see a long nasty domain name up top that is 100 characters long and they naturally get scared off. 100% iframing helps ease that comfort. I can have people visit my affiliate link, yet when they look at the domain, it just says kenster.com, it looks a lot more legit.


So if you are doing any kind of marketing instead of saying, go to kenster.com for this offer and then redirecting my domain where the people type in kenster.com and then magically a long 100 character sketchy looking domain name pops up, you can now say go to kenster.com and BAM! your affiliate offer pops up and the domain name is still kenster.com

This can have a dramatic impact on profit, especially if you are doing a lot of volume and looking to really optimize your campaign.


Remember that some offers and some affiliate managers dont let you iframe. Normally they dont mind 100% iframing if you explain that the only reason youre doing is wanting to keep your domain name up. I've never had a problem with it, but check with your AM if you are worried.


Hope I didnt confuse you more...


kenster