Recently there has been an increasing amount of talk online about the hot topic of "affiliate link hijacking". If you are unfamiliar with that term, let me give you a brief example. Let's say an affiliate runs an ad or sends an email recommendation with the standard looking affiliate link of: http://affiliatesite.com/cgi-bin/12345/IMakeMoneyOffYou.htmWhat some marketers of various software and website enhancement products would lead you to believe is that there is a rampant problem of people who are changing your affiliate link into their own before they purchase the product you advertised to them, thus not allowing you to receive credit for referring them. However the data does not support that assumption.
HERE'S THE REAL SCOOP... Like they say, "Documentation Beats Conversation", in the last 12 months, after selling more than $250 000 as an online merchant, paying out more than $125 000 to affiliates, and earning more than $100 000 from the various affiliate programs I promote, I have a very good understanding of what is really happening because of my unique insight on both the affiliate and the merchant side of Internet business.
There is bad news, but there is also some great news.
FIRST, THE BAD NEWS... Yes, I've found that an average of 30 to 40% of affiliate commissions go untracked. That means that for any given promotion, recommendation or marketing you do for an affiliate program, you are not going to receive credit for 30% or more of the sales that you generate - due primarily to the 3 main reasons I've identified below - because they were not tracked properly to you. Disheartened? Don't be. In just a minute, I will show you how to cut the number of lost sales down to virtually zero.
SO WHY ARE YOU LOSING SO MANY COMMISSIONS? It all boils down to 3 main reasons. Let's first look at those reasons and then I'll show you how to stop them from happening...
#1) The Deleted Cookie. Almost all affiliate programs today use a cookie to track sales because this is the only effective way to track sales of returning visitors. The way you lose the commission, though, is you refer people to a site, the cookie is set, but when they later come back to the site to buy, the cookie has been deleted from their computer and the sale therefore goes untracked. The most common way this happens is expiring cookies or manual deletion - the common occurrence of people clearing their cookies and "cache'.
#2) The Cut-Off. Instead of going to www.company.com/cgi-bin/12345 they go straight to www.company.com For whatever reason, some people (a significant percentage of people) don't like to be tracked, don't like someone earning money from their purchase, etc... so they go straight to the parent site by cutting off all of the obvious tracking stuff, in this example the /cgi-bin/12345, which means you won't receive credit for referring them.
#3) The Turn-Off. Most people, when they see an affiliate link, or even a redirect on the referrer's website (the basis of all of the "new solutions" that have popped up as of late) know that they are being sold to. Regardless of how well- meaning and unbiased the recommendation may be, it is all lost because that reader's "sales guard" goes up and it kills the honest recommendation.
HOW TO FIX THESE COMMISSION-ROBBING PROBLEMS. There are several options available to you as an affiliate...
Option #1: Do nothing. The first option is do nothing and continue to just use your normal affiliate link without using any of the link protection methods available to you. Definitely not the best choice, because it means you are always losing out on 30% to 40% of the sales you should be earning.
Option #2: Redirects on your website. What this means is you set up a page on your website and have it redirect to your affiliate link using a meta or _javascript redirect. This requires you to have your own website that you can upload new webpages to and you also know how to create redirects (it is a bit technical).
Option #3: Frame-forwards. You have your links forwarded inside an invisible frame. What that means is that your link is seamlessly forwarded inside an invisible frame, so that the domain name shown is held in the browser during the entire visit to the merchant's site. This is the best way to protect your affiliate link and also the easiest. In fact, I've used it to practically triple my affiliate sales overnight, and have been using this method ever since. You can read more about this at www.affiliatedoubler.com/grahamer Properly executed, this solution produces amazing results because your referral has all the appearances of the honest, unbiased recommendation that it is. This allows your audience to properly evaluate what you are recommending without their "sales guard" up. There are several additional benefits of AffiliateDoubler that go beyond the scope of this article - things like being able to show more than one window from just one link. The bottom line is this. The real problem is not "link hijacking", which can only really be solved by the merchant not allowing a customer to get a "discount" by buying through their own affiliate link, thus destroying the whole purpose of an affiliate program. (This is a whole other article by itself, one that reveals how merchant's well meaning intentions are robbing you of sales and there is nothing you can do about it.) Instead, the real reasons for lost commissions can easily be prevented by using domain name forwarding services like www.affiliatedoubler.com/grahamer, causing a nice increase in your monthly affiliate commission checks.
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