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what does hiding referrals mean? (10)

12-20-2014 02:25 AM #1 vaalion (Member)
what does hiding referrals mean?

Hi!

So my manager asked me to cloak my links, so I did it on Voluum based on country and device type mobile. Then he asked me if I hid my referrals, something like showing mysite.com instead of mysite.com/mylp.html.

How do I do that? Can you please further explain what it means? I'm a programmer so I can handle some technical explaination if required.

Thanks!

12-20-2014 03:17 AM #2 mehdi (Member)

Your affiliate manager ? weird, he's not supposed to do that and usually has no interest in you doing it

hiding the referrers means you use the "double meta-refresh" so that your cpa network can not see your landing pages, there's 2 main reasons to do that :
- hide your LPs so that your AM/CPA network can't share them with other affiliates, or run the campaign himself
- hide your LPs because you're using non-compliant marketing

Cloaking is something else, it's showing a different page given a set of rules, for example if you know that the reviewers from, say facebook, are in ireland, you set a rule to show any visitor from ireland your compliant page, and the rest (the real visitors) your non-compliant one.

There's more to it than that, but that's the basic principle.



Mehdi

12-20-2014 09:53 PM #3 stackman (Administrator)

haha slightly sketching, usually your AM asks to see your referrals to make sure you're not doing anything shady.

12-21-2014 07:36 AM #4 vaalion (Member)

yeah that am is def something else lol. Thanks for sharing medhi that explanation is great!

12-21-2014 01:10 PM #5 dr_ngo ()

I don't really hide my referrals.

The problem with doing double meta refresh is

a) It doesn't work 100% of the time. Some clicks WILL pass through. It only takes one click to reveal your landing page
b) MASSIVE clickloss especially when you're doing mobile.

That's why in general I prefer working with affiliate networks or direct advertisers that DON'T have an internal team. Even though a landing page can be a great competitive advantage, it's NOT a solid one. You can hide your referrals, but your competitor RIPS it and doesn't hide his. The network sees your landing page anyways.

12-30-2014 05:40 PM #6 Stark (AMC Alumnus)

Quote Originally Posted by dr_ngo View Post
affiliate networks or direct advertisers that DON'T have an internal team.
could you advice me, how could a newbie know if they have one ? aren't they supposed to hide such crews ?

05-15-2015 03:32 AM #7 hieu nguyen (AMC Alumnus)

My AM also told me the same when I applied to run my 1st sweeptake offer. What should I do now? Just run it or use double meta-refresh on Voluum?

05-16-2015 09:26 PM #8 cmdeal (Veteran Member)

In a perverse sense, if I had an affiliate manager that said this, that would raise some red flags ...

07-15-2015 08:10 PM #9 simon_89 (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by mehdi View Post
hiding the referrers means you use the "double meta-refresh" so that your cpa network can not see your landing pages, there's 2 main reasons to do that :
- hide your LPs so that your AM/CPA network can't share them with other affiliates, or run the campaign himself
- hide your LPs because you're using non-compliant marketing
Mehdi, so how about offers that require creative approvals(landing page)? Do we show AM's screenshots of our landing page instead of directing them to our site.

07-18-2015 07:38 AM #10 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Great discussion! I'm moving this to the "What does *** mean?" subsection.


Amy

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