Proxy Server Browsers or IP Anonymity? - What is what - and how does it work?
Good Monday morning people.
Here’s just some ideas, a problem I been struggling with, and possibly some help to other people here.
Our targets for affiliate marketing, certainly isn’t evenly distributed. The markets are focused in North America, UK and possibly Central Europe. And we therefore see these type of comments on many products / campaigns we intend to run;
“Merchant IP filtering might prevent foreign view”
Meaning that the merchant don’t want to waste time, money and website traffic from Geographical areas where he have no intention to do business or deliver product anyway.
A reasonable thing to do, and I guess a benefit for affiliate marketers, as we can display our ads in the correct geographical area anyway. Avoiding wasting our hard earned PPC cents on clicks in Zimbabwe - when we selling movie tickets in New York.
The affiliate marketers problem arises when you want to follow through on your campaigns, testing and tweaking and see what’s happen. How do you do that if all your links redirects to any old local websites. To make matters worse, some dating sites redirects to a similar local dating site - rather than the one you’re promoting.
A situation that could actually lead to you paying for clicks towards one page, and your visitors ending up on a totally different page - or website.
I was told that I need to use a proxy server, and I believe that AffiliateFix here makes one such proxy server available – namely; “Hide My Ass” - a server I be using occasionally. However, free proxy servers are bit messy to use, a bit sporadically whether they work or not, and I have reason to suspect that they don’t direct properly all the time.
Another issue is that you can't test directly in the search engines, or on your own landing pages, where you set up your PPC or banner campaigns.
My recent case study;
Last week I put up a fitness magazine campaign, targeting the US market only.
I tested some links in “hide my ass” and ended up at the magazine’s homepage - all well and good - so I proceeded with a campaign.
As you can see in my article under “follow along” and “What to do about a crappy destination page" I wasn’t very happy with workings of the merchants “landing page” which actually was the website home page.
As I wrote the mentioned article, I research further, and was curious about testing the campaign further.
I did some new searches regarding proxy servers, and I found https://anonymizer.com and also http://proxify.com/ and some others.
I decided to join anonymizer.com on a 14 day free trial period, (the cost is $79.99 for a full year) and proceeded to install some form of software on my machine. Proceeded to activate the newly installed program and WOOW - I could suddenly browse any websites I am promoting. (Later research showed that I appeared to be located in California rather than in Queensland.)
I was clicking away on link testing in 7 Search, and the right page popped up. I were testing banner ads on my landing pages - and they quickly and directly opened the merchants landing page.
What I found was that my magazine campaign, and the affiliate links for the same, did not directly to the magazine’s homepage - rather straight to the sign up form for magazine subscription.
No pre-selling at all - just straight to the basic form –“ sign here and give us your credit card details”.
(No wounder I spent almost 500 clicks without conversion.)
Geeeee, did that change my views, and the entire concept for the campaign? Here I was writing instructions on how to sign up from the magazine homepage - when I really should be pre-selling the subscription form instead.
So, the conclusion of the experience and the story.
Make sure you have something better than just a basic proxy search engine, hide your IP address, or reassign IP address - and get your campaigns right.
I believe that I wasted a fair bit of PPC money, being unable to follow through on testing the campaigns properly.
I hope this is of help for someone out there.
Cheers for now - and let’s go make a load of money this week.
Olle…
Good Monday morning people.
Here’s just some ideas, a problem I been struggling with, and possibly some help to other people here.
Our targets for affiliate marketing, certainly isn’t evenly distributed. The markets are focused in North America, UK and possibly Central Europe. And we therefore see these type of comments on many products / campaigns we intend to run;
“Merchant IP filtering might prevent foreign view”
Meaning that the merchant don’t want to waste time, money and website traffic from Geographical areas where he have no intention to do business or deliver product anyway.
A reasonable thing to do, and I guess a benefit for affiliate marketers, as we can display our ads in the correct geographical area anyway. Avoiding wasting our hard earned PPC cents on clicks in Zimbabwe - when we selling movie tickets in New York.
The affiliate marketers problem arises when you want to follow through on your campaigns, testing and tweaking and see what’s happen. How do you do that if all your links redirects to any old local websites. To make matters worse, some dating sites redirects to a similar local dating site - rather than the one you’re promoting.
A situation that could actually lead to you paying for clicks towards one page, and your visitors ending up on a totally different page - or website.
I was told that I need to use a proxy server, and I believe that AffiliateFix here makes one such proxy server available – namely; “Hide My Ass” - a server I be using occasionally. However, free proxy servers are bit messy to use, a bit sporadically whether they work or not, and I have reason to suspect that they don’t direct properly all the time.
Another issue is that you can't test directly in the search engines, or on your own landing pages, where you set up your PPC or banner campaigns.
My recent case study;
Last week I put up a fitness magazine campaign, targeting the US market only.
I tested some links in “hide my ass” and ended up at the magazine’s homepage - all well and good - so I proceeded with a campaign.
As you can see in my article under “follow along” and “What to do about a crappy destination page" I wasn’t very happy with workings of the merchants “landing page” which actually was the website home page.
As I wrote the mentioned article, I research further, and was curious about testing the campaign further.
I did some new searches regarding proxy servers, and I found https://anonymizer.com and also http://proxify.com/ and some others.
I decided to join anonymizer.com on a 14 day free trial period, (the cost is $79.99 for a full year) and proceeded to install some form of software on my machine. Proceeded to activate the newly installed program and WOOW - I could suddenly browse any websites I am promoting. (Later research showed that I appeared to be located in California rather than in Queensland.)
I was clicking away on link testing in 7 Search, and the right page popped up. I were testing banner ads on my landing pages - and they quickly and directly opened the merchants landing page.
What I found was that my magazine campaign, and the affiliate links for the same, did not directly to the magazine’s homepage - rather straight to the sign up form for magazine subscription.
No pre-selling at all - just straight to the basic form –“ sign here and give us your credit card details”.
(No wounder I spent almost 500 clicks without conversion.)
Geeeee, did that change my views, and the entire concept for the campaign? Here I was writing instructions on how to sign up from the magazine homepage - when I really should be pre-selling the subscription form instead.
So, the conclusion of the experience and the story.
Make sure you have something better than just a basic proxy search engine, hide your IP address, or reassign IP address - and get your campaigns right.
I believe that I wasted a fair bit of PPC money, being unable to follow through on testing the campaigns properly.
I hope this is of help for someone out there.
Cheers for now - and let’s go make a load of money this week.
Olle…
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