vossman

The reason I ask is that I had it set up for 2 different campaigns, and on some tests I ran I find a major problem. Now this may be a problem with Clickbank itself, but I wanted to get some input from anyone who may be using this already.

I am using the direct fetch method to retrieve a vendor's website and display it on my own page. In the configuration I have my hop link and the result page as the vendor page + the ?hop=affID as well. At first this looked like it was working beautifully. I would go to my own domain, it displayed the vendor's page perfectly, and when I clicked the order button the order form had my affiliate ID at the bottom. I put up my ads and got a sale within hours (luck of the draw).

5 days later and absolutely no more sales, even though I was getting roughly 30 clicks/day per campaign. I began testing the site using random computers and different browsers. What I found is that sometimes, not all times, and with no real reproducible sequence or settings, my affiliate ID was not registered when clicking the order button on either product site. I used friend's PCs, work PCs, Macs, firefox, safari, internet explorer, all with varied results, nothing that seemed dependent on the browser or its security/cookie settings, or the operating system. It was completely random. Sometimes it worked on the second round, or on a page refresh. I also tried reconfiguring the sites with the second PHP method (CURL vs Retrieve), and this did not change anything.

While my traffic wasn't ridiculously high, there is a good chance I missed a sale or two. I stopped running the campaigns and disabled the sites for the time being.

What I have read elsewhere though is that some people believed, even though they didn't have much proof, that Clickbank's code was not working properly. So perhaps the whole issue here lies with Clickbank and not Affiliate Prophet. But I cannot be certain at this point, and I'm not willing to spend more money on Ads if potentially I will miss sales.

If Peter Yoon is out there with some insight, or anyone can provide some feedback on their experiences with the affiliate spy method, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you in advance

-the Vossman

malcasid

Wow, still no answer? I am really interested in the direct fetch method myself. I hope it's just a temporary problem.

digitalmedia

I'm also interested in the answer to this. Have you tried Affiliate prophet support?

Anonymous Affiliate

Quick tip: when you send a tick to the Affiliate Prophet support, send it as "pre-sale questions" which are addressed by Peter Yoon himself. I tried sending some tickets as "customer support" and never got response...

Jesus Perez

This belongs in the Reviews section of the forum.

vossman

Please excuse the n00b....

vossman

I did create a ticket with AP support right after I made this post. I have not heard anything back from them yet, so I was considering sending Peter Yoon a PM on the forum to try to get his attention.

It's great to know they are only looking to answer pre-sales questions....

What I did find that was interesting though was this thread on clickbank ripping off affiliates:

62794-clickbank-ripping-affiliates-someone-filing-charges-against-clickbank.html

Since I could not find any other threads where people had this issue specifically with AP, I am leaning more towards the problem being with Clickbank. As a test I may just try to setup an affiliate spy site using another network and see if I can reproduce the results. It may make more sense that the clickbanks code for generating cookies is the problem, rather then the AP code since its the same PHP script running every time. Sometimes the cookie is there, sometimes not (me thinks).

If I get time to test this Ill put up the results. Thanks for the input so far.

-vossman

vossman

What I honestly did not know (i know, stupid n00b) was that using this method of the program is technically against Google's TOS. In light of wanting to do legitimate business and stay away from black hat techniques, I will no longer be using this method to try to advertise any products. I have closed my ticket with AP support and ask any administrator on here to close this thread as well as I do not wish to continue any further discussion on practices that are going to cause me, or anyone here, some trouble.

I apologize for being too anxious to read the rules.

ph1470

Yes, it is wise to follow the rules. Good decision oh young one.

vossman

I am not familiar with the network you are using, but here are the steps used for clickbank or any network that uses a hoplink/redirect URL to take you to the vendors page with your affiliate ID. I have to use spaces in the URL since I can't post links (or what appear to be link) in my posts yet.

Landing Page URL:
This needs to be the exact location of the website, and it needs to be a php file. If you own a domain, www dot someproduct dot com, then the landing page URL should be:
www dot someproduct dot com /index.php
Affiliate Link:
This needs to be your actual hoplink or redirect URL direct from the Affiliate Network. For example, in clickbank you would use the hoplink that clickbank gives you here. It would be :
http : // AFFILIATEID dot VENDORID dot hop dot clickbank dot net/ ?tid=%TID%
The Tracking ID(TID) is optional and should only be used if your affiliate network supports tracking. Similarly, "?tid=" is specific to clickbank, the tracking on your network may be different. What is important is that the %TID% goes after the = sign, because this is what AP uses to place the tracking id onto your URL


Destination URL:
This is the page that someone winds up at if they click or enter your hop link in a browser. In the example above, we would end up at
http : // www dot vendorswebsite dot com/?hop=AFFILIATEID
All you need to do is go to your own hop link, and then copy the URL out of the browser address box on top and paste it in here.

Also, you should really use the automatic FTP upload feature. This way you can be sure that the correct code is going into the file, rather then copying and pasting it.

If your affiliate network does not use hops perhaps you can give some more information on the whole process of getting to a site with your affiliate link and I can give you some advice.

Please also remember that what you are doing could be a violation of Google's TOS.

-vossman