Affiliate program doesn't know where my links are coming from?

8 replies
Hi,

Apologises as not sure where to put this.

Recently I have been contacted by an affiliate programme I make money from (for over a year now). They have asked me to provide the websites in which I have been referring traffic from. I gave them a couple but they said that they get no traffic from the websites in question. I have a LOT of sites so said I would try and get back to them about it once I have looked into it further. They said if I don't respond promptly they will deactivate my account.

It is going to be quite a hassle to go through my sites for them..but if they deactivate my account before I have a chance to go through them then I will still want to go through them to stop promoting them.

I have a feeling that the promotion I did for this particular programme maybe more social than website orientated.


Anyway I was just wondering something though. Why can't the affiliate programme see where my links are coming from? Should they be able to? I am a bit suspicious as to why they don't know already?

Thanks for the help.
#affiliate #coming #links #program
  • Profile picture of the author onSubie
    What is the URL you are using for your affiliate link?

    Are you using a cloaking service like bit.ly?

    The "Referrer URL" is used to determine where a visitor came from. If you are cloaking or using a link service that blocks the Referrer URL then your affiliate program will not be able to see where the traffic came from. Only that it came through an affiliate link.

    You should talk to your affiliate program and ask why it is they cannot see the referring site and what you can do to fix it. They may have rules about how links may be cloaked or redirected.
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    • Profile picture of the author keyaziz
      Thanks for the response. No I don't cloak any of my links.
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    • Profile picture of the author keyaziz
      No it doesn't say...its an in house programme.
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  • Profile picture of the author agmccall
    You should ask them for a list of the suspicious links, then you can research or verify.

    What I started doing is I created a WP site under one of my hosting accounts. This site domain is just something simple like alrecommends.com, then I installed pretty links and all my affiliate links go through there. Exception being Amazon links

    If I ever have a problem with and affiliate program or vendor I can easily redirect to a new product. or page of my choosing

    If, like you say, you are making sales I would remind them of that and tell them you will be deleting all links until they get it straightened out.

    al
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    "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." Thomas Edison

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    • Profile picture of the author keyaziz
      So I decided to ask them what specifically the problem was and logging into my account with them I see nothing is properly tracked etc.

      They now haven't responded...so I am guessing they don't actually know.
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  • Profile picture of the author marsh2015
    Hello
    Hello can you check on your SEO techniques of generating links.Especially when you are using the Guest post to generate back links you must be cautios since this is one of the risky strategies.
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  • Profile picture of the author Vendzilla
    They affiliate software is not very good if they can't identify where the inbound links are coming from. But I'm curious, If you gave them a url and they say that's not where it came from, how can they tell unless they physically checked that URL?
    Also I would check their TOS to see if you have violated anything.
    If it's more social, let them know that as well!

    Anyways, good luck with this, sounds like they have more information then they are willing to give out!
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