Magic
Links
"How to add affiliate links and ad-tracking codes to your referral URL links
without turning-off your prospects"
Part
2 The Coding
This description is based on the use of the AdMinder Advertising Manager.
This is simply because we use Adminder daily and find it is highly effective. One terrific feature that we love is that not only does it track ads and actions, it also tracks sales.
If you are tracking ads alone, that will tell you which ads perform best in terms of visitors - but it
won't tell which ads perform best in terms of sales. A crucial difference and that is why we use and recommend AdMinder.
The method will work equally well with all other ad tracking programs such as RoiBot.
Enough of the commercial, let's get down to the coding, which is disarmingly simple!
The
example I am going to use is an Affiliate link to a site called ecovergenerator.com
which
markets the really useful software program that makes generating
ebook covers a breeze, even for beginners.
Let's
look at these in reverse order, starting with
http://www.ecovergenerator.com/x.cgi?adminid=814&id=23443
This
is the link many advertisers would show at the bottom of their
ads.
Yuk!
Who would click on that hideous beast of a link? (Go on You try it)
See
- it works!
Look
at the components:
| http://www.ecovergenerator.com |
The
Merchant's website |
| x.cgi? |
Call
to a CGI script on the Merchant's site that processes the
AdMinder tracking and affiliate link code. |
| adminid=814 |
This
one's clever. The Merchant is using AdMinder. This ad is
being tracked on two systems! |
| &id=23443 |
My
Affiliate link code |
Now,
we want to replace that hideous code with something much
smarter, such as:
http://www.theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com/a/ecover
Note
that this also brings branding into the picture as in theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com
gets a mention!
The
Tricky Part
Assuming
you have a website called theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com
then make a sub-web (easy using MS FrontPage) with its own
index.htm file. (ie a home page)
Call
this subweb /a/ecover
Note
I use sitename.com/a/xxx but you don't have to use the /a subweb.
You could use just sitename/xxx (xxx would be ecover in this
case). I use /a to mean /adverts and I do it to separate all the
Ad codes from the other htm files in the website proper.
Now
edit the index.htm file to have only the following code:
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.adminder.com/c.cgi?dataway&mywslmecg">
</head></html>
Note
that you would change:
 |
'adminder.com'
for the name of your ad-tracking program |
|
'dataway'
for your login name |
|
mywslmecg
for your ad code |
What this does
When
the link http://www.theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com/a/ecover
is clicked on the prospect is taken to the home page at http://www.theaffiliatewebsitecompany.com/a/ecover
which re-directs the prospect to AdMinder using the code http://www.adminder.com/c.cgi?dataway&mywslmecg
AdMinder
then, in turn, re-directs again to the target site using http://www.ecovergenerator.com/x.cgi?adminid=814&id=23443
All
very clever!
A
Twist
Note
that you do not have to have an Ad Tracking program for this to
work.
In
this case just add the Target URL to the re-direct website, thus:
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; http://www.ecovergenerator.com/x.cgi?adminid=814&id=23443">
</head></html>
Generic
Description
Above,
I used a specific example. Below are the generic instructions.
If you would rather use your own URLs in your ads, as opposed to the "generic" AdMinder Gateway URLs,
there is a very simple solution. For example, let's assume that you have setup 10 Ad Codes ("ad1", "ad2", "ad3", etc.) and want to use your own URLs in your ads. Here's how to do it:
1. Create a new directory on your website and call it "web", etc.
2. Within the "web" directory, create a new directory for each Ad Code.
3. Within each of these directories, place an index.html that contains only this HTML code:
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.adminder.com/c.cgi?Username&AdCode">
</head></html>
Note: You can copy this HTML, just be sure to insert your own Username and Ad Codes!
So now, instead of using URLs like this in your ads ...
http://www.adminder.com/c.cgi?User&ad1
http://www.adminder.com/c.cgi?User&ad2
http://www.adminder.com/c.cgi?User&ad3
etc.
You can use your own URLs such as ...
http://www.yoursite.com/web/ad1
http://www.yoursite.com/web/ad2
http://www.yoursite.com/web/ad3
etc.
The HTML code above that you will place in each index.html file is a simple "meta refresh" which instantly redirects any visitors to the URL you specify in the meta refresh tag. Once you have created one of these index.html files it only takes a few seconds to make a copy of it, change the URL to correspond to a different Ad Code, and upload it to your site. Voila!
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