Prosper and Cloaking (9)
I have the Cloaking option on in Prosper for my LP's and was wondering does that actually mask my URL of my LP to the advertiser/network or not? Does this make it so they can't see my LP at all or know what the URL to it is?
And can the advertiser/network even tell if traffic is being direct-linked or coming from a LP?
Yea spot on man, they will just see the prosper redirect link.
A few rare browsers (mobiles/nerd who make their own) handle refer URLs differently though - so you need to be wary of that.
It only takes one doggy browser to leak the refer to your network, that's why some people like to use the https connection instead.
That been said, its been a long time since I've seen a 'unique' lander so you shouldn't really be to concerned about it unless you're doing $1ks+
The main thing is they don't know your ads/traffic source, but you have a lander so that's not an issue.
If you do any serious amount of volume it's quite easy for a network to see some of your main traffic sources.
So when you do get big, think about hosting your landers on a different domain than your tracking domain.
Okay thanks for this!
Part of the concern of the cloak is that for some offers, they say the advertiser must approve of LP's first and have certain restrictions such as no images that are too provocative or you can't have certain verbiage or whatever else. If I didn't want to deal with running every single image change or minor edit on my LP with the advertiser and just ran it, I'm a bit worried that if the advertiser could in fact see my LP, they could possibly say "Hey, you never showed us that image before and that was never approved! Therefore, we're going to retroactively charge-back all your conversions!"
So would the Prosper cloak help with this scenario?
And if they only see the Prosper redirect link, they can't tell if traffic came from a direct-link from my POF ad or from my LP, correct?
Yea they won't be able to see it, to put your mind at ease even more I'd use SSL instead.
Just make sure you get it approved as soon as you can, can't tell you how many times I've had an advertiser see my ad and complain.
Well I can, twice... but still, remember there's always the possibility of them seeing it from a 'targets' point of view.
How did they see your ad? Did you not have it cloaked? I realize they can do what you said about seeing it from the target's POV (ie - sign in as a regular user and start clicking ads).
Is there a benefit to not cloaking?
I would assume it's best to have cloaking on 100% of the time? Why would someone not? Is it maybe a speed thing? Having cloaking on makes it a tiny bit slower to load?
Pretty sure everyone online in that country saw the ad that day haha.
There was nothing I could do about cloaking it because the advertiser matched my target user demo.
It depends how much you trust the network your working with, the only drawback is speed, but speed matters a lot with volume.
The only reason I'd not cloak is when I 100% trust the advertiser.. or when I'm running mobile.
Prosper has been using a double redirect for a few years now, instead of a double meta refresh (DMR). It's pretty reliable.
The Prosper site itself says that the Prosper "cloaking" feature can add seconds to your redirects. They say:
Originally Posted by Prosper site
Some people say the original referrer sometimes comes through instead. I haven't experienced this myself.
SSL (HTTPS) is a bit slower than HTTP, throws up SSL errors in about 1% of visitors, and can only hide the referrer if you are linking to a non-SSL domain. There are also some issues with certain browsers and configurations eg. IE7 if you have it on your Prosper setup.
If you direct link from a HTTPS site (SSL) to a HTTP site (no SSL certificate), the referrer will always be blank. This is a HTTP standard.
THIS MEANS you don't need to use cloaking, and your redirects will be much faster.
If your offer link's first domain (the CPA network) has SSL/HTTPS, it will retrieve the referrer (the point BEFORE your tracking URL, eg. your LP or the traffic source itself) unless you are cloaking.
PRO TIP: if your CPA offer link shows "http://" at the start and you want to employ the HTTPS-->HTTP easy blank referrer technique, beware. Put that CPA offer link into an SSL checker such as
http://www.networking4all.com/en/sup...ls/site+check/
You will find a lot of them are actually HTTPS on the down low! Therefore you should cloak if you are using SSL/HTTPS yourself.
As above posters mentioned, cloaking when you have a Landing Page is not necessary unless yours is REALLY unique, and even then, they'd need to know your ads, bids, TRAFFIC SOURCE and everything else to emulate you.
PRO TIP (sorry I keep calling them this lol): I've seen Landing Pages that mention things like "dear Plenty of Fish users!" -- this is an easy way to let the advertiser know your traffic source if you're not being smart about it. Use a basic PHP script to interpret the referrer (if ads.pof.com or similar, it will spit out "Plenty of Fish") -- this way, when the CPA network checks the page, it will have a default value (if the referrer isn't ads.pof.com or similar).
My suggestions:
1. Check cloaked link redirection speed.
2a) If ok, stick with it
2b) If too slow, ensure you have VPS etc. Also Finch has recommended CPV Lab for its "blazing fast" redirects... so maybe look into that, but I don't see how such simple code can be faster in CPV Lab than Prosper.
Great comment!
Don't underestimate the effect that ANYTHING that slows your pages down can have on revenue. I've got a tutorial piece on this coming next week, but let's just say that my research so far has sent ME scurrying off to optimise my page speeds!
(For example - Google's research showed a 20% drop in revenue from a 500 ms ( half a second ) increase in page load time. And it's not like their pages were slow to begin with - that was on changing from a 400ms load time to a 900 ms load time.)
Caurmen, is there a link to that tutorial you mentioned on page speed optimization?
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