I have some affiliate sites and recently received two messages from site visitors who were interested in making a purchase but could not figure out how to click through to the purchase page. I chalked the first one up to some cranky person who didn't know how to run a browser.... I replied asking him the standard questions... what did you see on the site, what browser are you using, what version, etc. I couldn't figure it out so I blew it off. Then a second complaint comes in for the same page and that got me off of my ass.Here's what I think was happening.... Firefox has an option to block images that are being called from another domain (Tools >> Options >> Load Images for the originating website only). So, if you are using an image server or calling images from the affiliate program's website you might be losing a bunch of dough.
I am also wondering if there are some ad blockers that can smell parametered affiliate links and will block images that link through them from displaying in the broswer? If you have any good info related to this or other affiliate link problems, please post them as comments below. Maybe we can get a collection if ideas right here. Thanks!
The problem runs beyond just browser options and hosting images locally. Many anti-spyware apps, firewalls, anon-surfing apps, anti-virus programs etc etc also try to do people a favour by blocking 'ads'. Many have built in lists of cookies to refuse and links to never show. Even if you host images locally and mask urls they may block the images/ads if they are named something obvious like '768x40_ad.jpeg' or have alt text like 'Click here to visit our Sponsor'. I have seen them block internal ads on our sites like 'sign up for our newsletter'.
Zone Alarm, Norton, Outpost, and many many other common apps do this. Many programmers still feel that the internet is FREE and us marketers are ruining all the fun.
So if you want to be serious about it:
Host images locally AND give them different innocuous sounding names.
Mask all affiliate links through local pages (and ip-deliver naked links to the bots)
BTW: many affiliate networks (the CPA guys anyway) are suggesting that you mask links ESPECIALLY in emails. But I have not seen them suggesting to host images locally. Probably because they get a lot of impression data? And value that more than a small % of lost commissions?
Thanks Jason, that sounds like top info and good advice.
Now... it sounds to me like an honest person with a few links to the affiliate program, does everything out in the open, tries to conceal nothing is going to take a whack while the person who does this "link cloaking" stuff is going to be a cool dude.
I would have NEVER guessed that using images not locally hosted could cause problems. Thanks for the priceless tip!
Thanks for the ideas. My situation was easy to fix.
The larger point is... If little me was losing some sales this way (and maybe some search engine rankings - although I am not quite a thin affiliate)... then why are lots of the major affilite programs and even networks still suggesting this type of linkage? I posted this here because I think some education is in order. Those guys should be telling me to put the images on my own site and getting some creative way to get the purchase from my site to theirs.
EGOL I always recommend pulling images through an onsite proxy. My reason was that if I were a search engine looking for "thin" affiliate websites ( via the spam doc [rtf document] leaked from google ) I would look at the number of offsite links and other tell tales an affiliate site.
Always, and I mean always hide those affiliate URL's and it is very easy to to.
Here is the outline of one method. 1. Your link is < a href="https://yourDomain.com/external/1/" >https://yourDomain.com/external/1/ 2. Have a script e.g. parse every request for something in the virtal external directory. 3. Pare out the link number e.g. 1 4. Make a lookup in a SQL database with your external links. 5. Redirect the visitor to the correct site.
Similar issue with images.
EGOL - One option might be for you to contact the affiliate program and download all the images onto your own server. Then you can do a "find and replace" for img src="https://" code and change it to src="./"
As for ad blockers - I've seen the same effect in IE for certain sites. I think you can apply the same setting there too.