Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Is There Any Way To Track Re-directs?

Posted by Anonymous on 7/11/2008 at 7:10 PM ET 25 Points
One of our affiliates has a competing ad on google with us which links him to a shopping bot then the affiliate network and finally our website. I can see the urls flash through the address bar but i cannot fully make them out. Does anyone know of a program or application that I could use to figure out or track which sites I am being redirected through??

Thanks!
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by excellira on 7/11/2008 at 8:12 PM Accepted
    There are numerous online tools which will do this but, though I typically use FF my favorite is a plugin for IE called HTTPWatch. It's free and will read and report on the headers.

    https://httpwatch.com/

    If you prefer to use FF there is a plugin call HTTP Live Headers which can be downloaded here:

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829

    I like the above tool but HTTPWatch is my preferred tool.

    I hope this helps.

    Best,

    Greg Hill
    Trinity Search Engine Marketing

  • Posted on 7/14/2008 at 4:04 PM Author
    Thanks Greg, I will check it out.
  • Posted on 7/14/2008 at 4:27 PM Author
    Well I got it working Greg, exactly what I was looking for. Thanks a bunch! Now its just a question of figuring out how to use all the information it gives me.
  • Posted by excellira on 7/14/2008 at 4:31 PM Member
    Glad I could help.

    Best,

    Greg
  • Posted by matthewmnex on 7/14/2008 at 8:38 PM Member
    Typically the re directs that you are seeing are just counters.

    You will frequently see double click or trade Doubler for instance.

    The affiliate company will always embed the destination URL on their server and the initial click will go first to the affiliate server and then bounce back to the destination URL. Sometimes, when there are 2 affiliates involved, you may get 2 bounces in between.

    Basically all that is happening is that they want to be sure they are receiving the correct commission for any sales and or clicks that are paid for.

    Since each url is uniquely identified with a final destination url, knowing the url in itself does not help you because as soon as you click it, it will bounce you back to the destination url and count you as 1 click.

    here is a typical example from one of our campaigns.

    https://clk.tradedoubler.com/click?p=17832&a=1463742&g=16810038&url=https:/...

    We have 2 bounces infact before you reach Yves-Rocher's site because we use an email tool that tracks all the links for us to count opening and CTR rates etc. So you would first go to our private server which then bounces to the trade doubler server and finally you end up on the Yves-Rocher server.

    All 3 parties involved then have their own count and we can reconcile our numbers against theirs later when we want to receive our commissions. It is pretty straight forward really.

    Hope this is of help.

    Matthew
  • Posted on 7/15/2008 at 11:42 AM Author
    Using the FF tool I have noticed that most of the redirects are just for tracking purposes. I spent some time yesterday just clicking our PPC links and our organic links just to see where they went and how our tracking was working.

    I have strayed from my original purpose of seeing what shopping bot our affiliate was linking through to figuring out why my google tracking was not working. Lets just say I had no idea how many different websites/urls I was actually visiting each time i clicked a link. Thanks for the info Matthew, I appreciate it.
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