Affiliate Marketing Tycoon

**Jon12345** · 01-01-2007, 07:08 PM

I have noticed that some Adwords advertisers have this set up:

Adwords > tracking site > actual site

...where the tracking site just logs the stats and then they are immediately redirected to the actual site.

Questions:

1. Why would they do this and not just track from the actual site?

2. Is this against Google's (MSN's/Yahoo's) TOS since you are not directing them immediately to the landing page but instead going via an intermediate page?

3. Would this affect your quality score?

4. How do they do the redirect (or what is the best way)? Is it just a php header('Location:PlaceURLHere') command? Or do they do something different?

Thanks,

Jon

**beachbumis** · 01-01-2007, 07:31 PM

Check the Google site, but I think a page that re-directs is against the Google TOS.

Michael

**Lucas3677** · 01-01-2007, 11:52 PM

1. They might do it to have more control over their statistics or they just don't trust Google with detecting click fraud.

4. A PHP header redirect would probably be the best.

**NeverblueJordan** · 01-02-2007, 08:16 PM

I'd say they do it mostly because they don't just run their ads on google and they use their own system to track their results all in one place. Most of the time those redirects also drop a cookie to track conversions.

They have traffic from google, overture, affiliates, natural search, banner networks, link exchanges etc etc and they track each promotion in their own internal tracking system. Also, many times they are promoting much more than one product as well and they like to track all their promotions for all of their sites through a single interface.

Lots of times those redirects are also affiliates promoting products and using their own systems to track results. To the best of my knowledge google doesn't mind tracking redirects. I see atdmt and affiliate network redirects all the time.

**ghoti** · 01-02-2007, 09:55 PM

1. Because sometimes the merchant's tracking is not as good (not as accurate, or not as immediate, etc.). And because you get to see the referers to see where the traffic is coming from.

2. As long as the Display URL matches the final landing page, Google and Yahoo are okay with it. (In the pre-Panama version of Yahoo, you can't really do this because your Display URL is extracted from the URL for your ad and you can't set it separately from the destination URL.) MSN seems to be really lax about this.

3. I haven't seen it affect my quality score.

4. Yes, PHP redirect is the typical way to do it.