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Tracking Pixel Only Fires From the Domain it Resides on

by eightofdiamonds
4 replies
I have been running CPA offers for a bit now through a CPV network. After a few conversions I noticed that my tracking pixel was not firing. I've found that it does work from the domain the pixel is hosted on.

Example:

http://www.mydomain.com/convert

with this pixel on the page:

<img src="http://www.mydomain.com/conv.php" width="1" height="1" />

Works fine.

But since I have the pixel placed on the merchants domain it won't fire convert.php. I have also tested the pixel on other domains I own and that doesn't work either.

It seems to restrict php scripts unless they run from the exact domain that they reside on, which makes a tracking pixel useless. I've been waiting for a response from my hosting company but I though maybe some one here has run into a similar situation.

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated. I've searched most of the day and it seems I'm the only one who's had this problem in the history of the internet. :confused:

Thanks!
#domain #fires #pixel #resides #tracking
  • Profile picture of the author KirkMcD
    Have you checked your server's log files to see if the request is in there and its status?
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  • Profile picture of the author LenD
    Originally Posted by eightofdiamonds View Post

    I have been running CPA offers for a bit now through a CPV network. After a few conversions I noticed that my tracking pixel was not firing. I've found that it does work from the domain the pixel is hosted on.

    But since I have the pixel placed on the merchants domain it won't fire convert.php. I have also tested the pixel on other domains I own and that doesn't work either.

    It seems to restrict php scripts unless they run from the exact domain that they reside on, which makes a tracking pixel useless. I've been waiting for a response from my hosting company but I though maybe some one here has run into a similar situation.

    Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated. I've searched most of the day and it seems I'm the only one who's had this problem in the history of the internet. :confused:

    Thanks!
    Some server control panels have default anti-leeching settings enabled. If this is the case on your server, the image will not be delivered to the remote browser. Check with your hosting company.
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    • Profile picture of the author saschakimmel
      Well, it's a PHP script which is usually not regarded as an image and even the server can only find out that it delivers an image after it has executed the script which would result in a log file entry.

      So I think that no anti-leeching rule would apply, because for the server it's just a normal PHP script that is accessed with a referrer from another domain (which happens all the time if you click on a link and go from one page on one domain to another page on another domain).

      My questions are:
      a) Which browser are you using for testing? Internet Explorer? Maybe the image is retrieved from the browser cache the second time? Try to empty your cache before testing from a remote domain or use Firefox instead or set your browser's cache check to "every time" instead of "automatically" in IE.

      b) In addition when using tracking pixels you should always use a random value to prevent caching and send the appropriate no-cache headers:
      Something like this:
      ...img src="httpFAKE://FAKEmydomain.com/conv.php?328479324" width="1" height="1" ...

      Keep in mind that the value should be changed on every page load so this might be more feasible:

      <script type="text/javascript">
      document.write('...img src="httpFAKE://FAKEmydomain.com/conv.php?rnd='+Math.random()+'" width="1" height="1" alt="" /...');
      </script>
      <noscript>
      ...img src="httpFAKE://FAKE.mydomain.com/conv.php?2184768" width="1" height="1" alt="" /...
      </noscript>

      Please note that I added the "alt" attribute to the image tag as it is required per HTML definition.

      If this still does not work simply send me a PM - maybe I can add the code to one of my sites for testing.

      Please note: I had to invalidate the image tags because the forum does not let me post image tags because I have less than 15 posts yet.
      So you have to modify the tags beforehand, sorry, it's not my fault.
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  • Profile picture of the author saschakimmel
    I guess that's what you call "side effects" - I just wanted to help and couldn't post the clean code because it was detected as trying to post images and links. Doh!
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