Is it possible to hide your source of traffic source? (9)
just a paranoid question here...
When u guys do media buys from different sites, is there any way to hide that?
Just wondering if that - Meta Fresh or Double Meta Fresh does that ? (or does that only hide your lander)
i figured that if someone wanted to know where the traffic is coming from... that would be easy to find out
hide your media buy placements from whom? If you mean the affiliate network:
unless direct linking, they should not be seeing the referrers of your placements but rather your landing page link. Double meta refresh among other "cloaking" methods will clear your landing page referrers from the headers so the aff network sees nothing.
Really? I didn't know that
I thought they can see it somehow.
I'm really not worried about anyone ripping my landers..
Just wanted to keep the source safe
Use a lander.
DMR and Double Redirect (latter used by Prosper) both leak the referrer -- even if it's only 1% of the time, it's enough to 'out' you. In some situations with some browsers, that original referrer just sticks on due to weird combinations of browser plugins (esp. McAfee or other AV / site-checking addons) and other variables on the client side.
Originally Posted by redrummr
Safest bet is always going to be a lander, even if all it does is load a loading gif and redirect after 1 second.
A HTTPS redirect will remove the referer.
Originally Posted by manny030
The problem is, some browsers will pass on a referrer that lingers from before the https connection.
They shouldn't, but not all browsers behave compliantly in every given situation.
All true. SSL is also 300-500ms slower (sometimes worse, especially for mobile).
That's for the first visit. Subsequent visits are much faster, but in our industry, we deal in a lot of single-and-only visits and 500ms can be very expen$ive (Amazon showed that every 100ms in additional load time decreased their sales by 1%).
Now, e-commerce users are a bit different to users that we target, and I wouldn't worry about an additional 200-300ms for users who click ads and aren't entirely sure about what sort of lander to expect. I run several private services that deal with additional load time (cloaking, which is a single check, and another service that is somewhat relevant to this thread -- two-trip handshake like SSL) and I have not seen any significant drop in visitors/revenue and neither have my partners reported this. That's because we provide up to 6 servers which can be set in an order of preference in the client files, and selecting the server closest to you means the time is as low as possible. SSL doesn't allow this sort of geo-location by design, you need to have a few different certificates set up (at various providers who have authentication server close to the region you're serving), different IPs and so on.
It's browsers and client setups that violate the standards.
It's relatively simple to create a javascript redirect page as an interim between your banner and your offer. So essentially your funnel goes...
Banner -> js page -> js page again (checks that referer is js page) -> offer
I've created a script to do this and i have it set up on its own domain, so you send any link you want to hide referer for to "yourdomain.com?url=offerurl.com&password" and yourdomain.com is always the referer.
Happy to share the script with instructions if there's any interest. It does the job for me but i'm sure could be improved upon 
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