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Hi. I am seeing what I believe to be way too many log entries for my affiliates. For example, one affiliate has 42 log entries for November in the log manager, and only 4 when looking at my host's AWStats page. From the 4 referrers from my AWStats page, none of the referrer URLS are attached to any of the log entries in Affiliate Tracker... I understand this can happen if someone visits my site from theirs directly (without an affiliate link), but there are no links on their site without their affiliate link. This affiliate does not get very much traffic to their site where they have their affiliate link posted, and I seriously doubt 42 legitimate click-thrus are happening - 4 seems much more realistic. So of course their commission keeps growing.
What can I look at to prove this theory?
What can I look at to prove this theory?
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Fair enough.
For anyone else who is needing to do this, I think I figured it out.
In the /plugins/system/affiliate_tracker/affiliate_tracker.php file,
Replace:
With:
This will only log a conversion when the affiliate link was clicked on from an actual page, at least best that I can tell from my initial tests. This means, any bots that crawl your affiliate sites and follow the affiliate link will not generate unwarranted commission for your affiliates like it was for me. This seems to be more accurately logging commissions for me resulting from valid click thrus from a real human.
I really don't have an understanding as to why this wasn't already implemented in the code this way. If you are converting all link clicks, why would you ever want to convert a link that wasn't actually clicked on from another page? I am not the developer here, obviously, and am not the subject matter expert, so I'm just sharing what worked for me.
References:
http://www.joomlathat.com/documentation/affiliate-tracker/using-the-api-to-create-conversions
http://www.joomlathat.com/support/affiliate-tracker/initial-questions-from-a-new-user#reply-23938
For anyone else who is needing to do this, I think I figured it out.
In the /plugins/system/affiliate_tracker/affiliate_tracker.php file,
Replace:
AffiliateHelper::create_conversion($conversion_data, $user_id);
With:
if ($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) {
AffiliateHelper::create_conversion($conversion_data, $user_id);
}
This will only log a conversion when the affiliate link was clicked on from an actual page, at least best that I can tell from my initial tests. This means, any bots that crawl your affiliate sites and follow the affiliate link will not generate unwarranted commission for your affiliates like it was for me. This seems to be more accurately logging commissions for me resulting from valid click thrus from a real human.
I really don't have an understanding as to why this wasn't already implemented in the code this way. If you are converting all link clicks, why would you ever want to convert a link that wasn't actually clicked on from another page? I am not the developer here, obviously, and am not the subject matter expert, so I'm just sharing what worked for me.
References:
http://www.joomlathat.com/documentation/affiliate-tracker/using-the-api-to-create-conversions
http://www.joomlathat.com/support/affiliate-tracker/initial-questions-from-a-new-user#reply-23938
Responses (8)
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0For me, a conversion is a link click. This is an older post of mine where you helped me configure that:
http://www.joomlathat.com/support/affiliate-tracker/initial-questions-from-a-new-user#reply-23934
I'm guessing then, that every log entry is resulting in a conversion, regardless of whether or not a link 'click' originated from a bot or not. If that's true, how do I resolve this?
Thanks -
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0oh I see
yes in that case that's what's happening of course, every visit to your site (click or no actual click) is a conversion.
that's why direct logs should not become conversions. You have no way of knowing if someone will just hit a link many times or even an affiliate would generate a way of generating fake traffic for him..
you can't "resolve" this, this does not depend on you... your affiliates should, at the very least, put a rel="nofollow" attribute on their links to your site. -
Accepted Answer
0Thanks for confirming. If I want to remove the existing conversions for the ones that were likely a result of a bot following the link, can I simply unpublish the conversion entries from the admin side? I'm not wanting the affiliate to get credit for these conversions that most likely did not result in an actual user click through.
And to prevent this from continuing, can I wrap the conversion entry from the previous post with an if statement that checks if there is a referrer included in the log data?
Such as
if ($data['referrer']){
$conversion_data = array(
"name" => "Click on link",
"component" => "com_affiliatetracker",
"extended_name" => "Account ID: " . $data['atid'],
"type" => 1,
"value" => 1 ,
"reference_id" => $data['atid'],
"approved" => 1,
);
}
Would something like this work and be a reliable method? -
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