Because Yahoo does not know…
Hey guys - a little help please.
Yahoo is rolling out the ability to Block Domains in the near future. The only problem is that we are having a hard time getting visibility into the domains we might want to block.
Google has long had the &site={placement} tag that will pass the referring domain so we could track conversions.
Something Yahoo does in their redirects keeps us from knowing where a huge percentage of the Yahoo traffic originates from. I’m not the servers guy and I did not understand the Swahecian Tech dialect he spoke trying to explain the issue.
We have of course asked our Yahoo reps who are normally pretty helpful, but they seem to be clueless here.
Does anyone know of a tag we can put into the landing page URL that will allow us to collect the referring page in Yahoo?
October 11th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
on my blog there’s a click tracking script. In it you’ll find:
// Server variables
$ip = $_SERVER[’REMOTE_ADDR’];
$referer = $_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’];
$useragent = $_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’];
This will gather the appropriate data for you then you can write it to a db or file or whatever. I’d just write it to a file using something like:
file_put_contents(”click_data.txt”,$ip.”,”.$referer.”,”.$useragent.”\n”;
I’ve been running some payday stuff on Yahoo search and their sites they consider are “Partners” are shit in my opinion. In 50 clicks I got a refund on 12 for fraud, 26 were from Domainer sites and the remainder were from yahoo search. I haven’t run the Content network but that’s a pretty standard way to grab the appropriate data in PHP.
Here’s a link to a tutorial on how to write a simple click tracking script in PHP which I mentioned that code came from above.
http://oooff.com/php-affiliate-seo-blog/php-automation-coding/more-advanced-click-keyword-to-directtrack-system-conversion-tracking/
October 12th, 2007 at 12:45 am
its very helpful to set up your own click tracking as Smaxor says. You can track tons of information on your clicks. I just finished coding my click tracking for some ringtone offers. I’m tracking timestamp, ip, ppc company, search/content, keyword, referer (mentioned above), click through (whether they actually click off of my landing page, or whether they leave), landing page variation, and a few other things. It allows me to know which traffic converts best, which landing page converts best, what keywords are best, etc. I can tell when one IP has visited too often, easily ban the IPs or just add them to a list. Here’s some screenshots of the setup, its not finished, but its what I have after a day’s effort of coding it and the site. http://www.alexanderonlinemedia.com/images/clicktracking.jpg
October 12th, 2007 at 7:20 am
Thanks guys - We have tried just about everything from our side. It still works out that we capture the true referrer a very small percentage of the time. The rest of the time we get the referrer as one of Yahoo’s click tracking/redirect domains. This tells us it comes from one of their ‘partners’ it just does not tell us which one.
The overall conversion rate for us on this ‘partner’ traffic is dogmeat, we thought about just killing them all, but as with everything we suspect there are a few gems that have real traffic that converts.
October 12th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
That’s confusing to me as I very rarely get redirect domains. I get all the locations of the shit domainers. And yes the “Partner” traffic is horse shit. The problem is I haven’t found a definitive answer on whether the new blacklisting is going to block just people on content or it’s going to allow you to block parners as well. Have you heard anything?