ensigcom
ensigcom
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Hello,

During development/testing of my site i have been logged in as user A while also viewing the site as another user B from an incognito window on the same browser. I am not sure how but affiliate tracker started tracking activity. I also noticed that bots crawling the site (despite it being locked by site-lock) also created affiliate log activity. I am proving the screenshot below in case anyone can explain to me how this happened.

Somewhere in the mid you will see the affiliate link atid=1 which was my own manual test of the link. Everything else, including the empty rows without any explanation, where created by means which i do not understand. Please let me know:

- Since the affiliate link was not published anywhere, how can crawler bots create affiliate log activity? Is this expected behavior?
- What do the empty (no-url) lines mean?

The screenshot shows 20 referrals. One of them was my own testing in the mid, and the rest (both before and after) where unknown sources.

Thank you for the information
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  • Accepted Answer

    Wednesday, November 18 2015, 05:25 PM - #Permalink
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    Hello!

    a couple important things to consider:

    1. there's no problem with the referral being "empty", that does not mean it's an error. it's just that the visit does not come directly from a click on another site.

    2. the fact that you're seeing logs that you don't know where they coming from can be explained probably by some widgets you may have on your site.
    For example, if you have a facebook "like" button, or an analytics tracker (I can see some logs coming from "rankings-analytics" website), these widgets usually make additional "calls" to the website when you visit the page. since these are made from other website they are counted as "logs" as well.

    But do not worry about logs, this is just "internal" information for the system to determine if a sale came actually from an affiliate link.
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