Tracking, Cloaking & Other Stuff

Here’s the post I read from Nana of T202 team:
http://prosper.tracking202.com/blog/money-loves-speed

Very good post and has lots of information in it. But what’s the most important is the cloaking part. We as affiliates always try to protect our assets. While not a brick & mortar businesses, our assets are often times digital and non-tangible.

Cloaking your links has been a dogma in affiliate marketing world for quite a while. You must cloak links or some assholes will steal your clickbank commissions. You must cloak your links or CPA network AM’s will see your traffic sources and steal your campaigns. While that does happen, and there’s always a threat, this post shows you the benefits of doing the opposite.

Cloaking your links will cost you. Not $$’s, but time, which is even more valuable. Every second your site delays to load content costs you money. It’s a proven fact. Read that article, they show the research done by top companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google. For PPV guys it’s even more crucial. You get tons of visitors. Each impression counts as a visitor. While it’s cheap, you spend only $10 per day and think that it’s not much traffic, you actually get roughly about 1000 visitors per day. Spend $100/day and you’re doing 10,000 visitors a day. Now that really can bog your shitty shared Bluehost server. Why Bluehost? They suck balls that’s why. Worst server uptime of all. Anyway…

Cloaking is bad, mkay… Well, not exactly bad, but it can cost you in terms of conversion rates, EPC’s. Sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. I’ve done some lame ass testing myself and cloaking does put weight on redirects. Quite a lot actually. Now one important thing. Some new affiliates may not realize it, but there’s no reason to cloak your landing page redirects as AFF network will not see your referral anyway. Well, unless you’re trying to hide the LP. But if LP is approved, don’t cloak those damn links.

For testing, I don’t even cloak direct linking campaigns. AM’s I deal with, I trust. Maybe I’m an idiot 🙂 But I’m sure they won’t fall for slow volume campaigns, or even big volume ones. So if you’re just starting out, don’t listen to all this stuff about cloaking. Unless you’re totally paranoiac like Mel Gibson’s character in that movie Conspiracy Theory (loved it BTW). But in any other way, try to avoid it. Your fear of losing few dollars to supposedly shady AM’s can cost you more in commissions. It’s not worth it when you’re starting out. And if you are experienced, there are ways to boost server response time. Just dig the web.