How are people accessing my "thank you" page without my aweber subscriber count increasing?

2 replies
Here's something strange that's happening with a new list I am building. I hope someone can help me out:

I am advertising my squeeze page on 6 or 7 different safe lists. Clicks are coming in steadily. The URL of the squeeze page is /go. Once I collect a name and an email address, my subscriber count goes up by 1, and they are redirected to /lesson1 to begin the program. I accomplished this redirect easily using aweber's "thank you page" URL setting.

FYI: I am *not* using double opt-in.

That's how it is supposed to work... and that's how it works every time aweber or I test it out. But here's what I am noticing in my wassup logs (access logs):

People are in fact hitting /go from the safe list URL, and then a few seconds to a minute later they are accessing /lesson1. Seems fine, until I check aweber 10 minutes later and NO new subscribers are captured. I thought it was a glitch, so I waited for more evidence: there have been 20 or 25 unique IPs that are having the same thing happen, and aweber confirmed these IPs are NOT already on my list.

So how the heck are people getting redirected to the thank you page without aweber capturing their info and adding +1 to my list?
#accessing #aweber #count #increasing #opt-in #page #people #problem #subscriber #thank you #thank you page
  • Profile picture of the author Streamline
    I may have solved this mystery just now... funny how that happens moments after you ask the general public for help.

    If I inspect the source code to my squeeze page, it seems that my aweber form has a hidden link to the "thank you" page.. My guess is that bots are crawling each link on my page. Why would they do that so often, you ask? Safe lists are notorious for junk traffic... most of the "users" are just robots who click links in order to get credits to have their OWN site seen by other people... or bots in this case.

    So that's just the way it is

    Make sense?
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[6294210].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
    Quick answer? They're not getting redirected.

    My guess is that they are either guessing your url for the first lesson, or, more likely, someone is spreading it around.

    Another possibility is that you are inadvertently giving it away yourself. Are all the lessons in one folder (subdirectory)? If so, you should put an index page in the folder. It doesn't even need content - just a blank html template or a redirect back to your squeeze page.

    Otherwise, if someone types in the url with the subdirectory, they will get a list of the pages and folders in that folder. With an index page, the server will attempt to display what it believes to be the 'home page' for that folder.

    The next step is to change the names to something harder to guess. If you still get accesses without subscriptions, odds are you have a content thief on your list...

    Edit: Streamline, you posted while I was typing. If the thank you page url is visible in the source code, you may be right.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[6294236].message }}

Trending Topics