Plugging Leaks

[BuyJewelry]

Hello All,

Leaks are bad for both the affiliate and the merchant. Affiliates are driving traffic to a site, and then don't see any benefit from the visitor visiting an adsense link. Merchants are driving potential customers away.

I know about the common leaks that affiliates don't like to see on sites they promote (banner ads, adsense, links to other companies). I'd like to start a discussion about leaks that affiliates see that merchants might not know about.

thanks.

 

[Linda Buquet]

800#s is the other biggie. Plus sometimes a merchant's live chat app is set to over-write affiliate cookies and sometimes I hear about links in the merchant's newsletter overwriting affiliate links. So those are other ways an affiliate could drive a new customer but not get credit for the sale.

Thanks for bringing up a great topic!

 

[BuyJewelry]

Thanks Linda,

the 800# leak can plugged by placing some programming code to present the affiliate information next to the phone number. So when someone calls the merchant knows to ask for the affiliate number. I didn't think of live chat, that is an excellent conversion tool - and merchants can plug the leak by putting similar code near the 'chat' button.

As far as live chat over-writing cookies, isn't that not possible, since only the domain that wrote the cookie can read and write to that cookie? I guess the only way for a live chat to overwrite a cookie would be if the chat application is hosted on the same domain. Am I wrong about this?

Any more?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Well don't remember the exact situation or if cookies were over written or how it happened, just remember some affiliates saying some merchant's chat apps were taken away the commission.

Yes I know about the 800 tracking that CAN be done but the issue for newbie affiliates to be aware of is that 90% of the merchants will 800#s don't enable phone tracking, so if they don't it's still a leak.