Why would you want to blank your referrals?
If you don’t blank your referrals the affiliate network and the advertiser are seeing exactly where your traffic is coming from! Hello!? Why would you want to give them the pin to your ATM card?
If they know where your traffic is coming from, chances are that they know how you are getting traffic and what landing page you are using. Giving away that information is suicide!
So, let’s hash this out:
You are a middle man… They have all of your information and data… why do they need you?
They don’t!
Here’s how you can protect yourself. Last thing you want is for them to decide that they would make more money by hiring someone in-house to run the exact campaign that you are running and cut you off (or not even tell you.)
Here’s how you can blank your referrals successfully and be NEEDED by the advertisers:
- Setup an SSL, you can get one from GoDaddy.
- Any web administrator or hosting can Set it up for you.
- Put the following code in a file called “outbound1.php”
- <?php
{
echo “<meta http-equiv=\”refresh\” content=\”0;url=https://yourdomain.com/outbound2.php\”>”;
}
?> - Put the following code in a file called “outbound2.php”
- <?php$referer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];if($referer == “”)
{
echo “<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=https://YourAffiliateLink.com/subid”>”;
}
else
{
echo “<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://other.com”>”;
}?>
- Make sure that you change “YourAffiliateLink.com/subid” to your actual affiliate link from the network or advertiser.
- Now all you have to do is link to https://yourdomain.com/outbound1.php to blank your referrals.
That’s it! You now have mostly blank referrals. You will never be 100% but this will blank the vast majority of them.
Very very useful tip, thanks for sharing. I have had that “the advertiser reviewed your traffic and wanted a screenshot of the traffic source and landing page you are using…” conversation before and it makes perfect sense to protect your interests, not theirs.
The only reason to review your traffic source is to steal your traffic or if you are doing blackhat and they want to make you sweat.
Any network that has EVER once forwarded a message from an advertiser (or sent one themselves) to ask about my traffic source, I have never worked with again. Except for one case where they had a management change and policy change.
Very useful. Let me ask, what’s the purpose behind the SSL? Is one required to blank referrers?
Thanks
doesnt 202 cloak as well…?
Brian I know Tracking 202 has a built in cloaking option but I was curious about renaming cloaked options, which you solution would allow (and T202 but would be a ton of work either way).
In PPV traffic a lot of times people bid on URLs and use the URL as a subid so we know what converts and what doesn’t. I would love a product that could take a link like http://www.yourdomainname.com/affurl?subid=http://www.bidsite.com and converted it to ?subid=1 and kept a list in some database as to what ’1′ would equal.
I really don’t want to send 10,000 ppv links and give any advertiser my exact source.
Hi Brian,
Just wondering why do you need a SSL? Cos i read on BHW a similar code, except that it does use SSL…
Henry
The SSL makes it block a higher percentage of referrals. The Meta refresh only gets so many. Using an SSL acts a referral cleaner. Technically, you could use JUST an SSL and block a high percentage of referrals. So, the combination of both makes it really good.