Cookie Stuffing, Image Method
So how do I get a cookie from my server to your computer, from another domain? Well you cookie stuff them. By placing an html image tag on your webpage with your affiliate link. The link will look similar to the following.
<img src=”http://www.youraffiliatelink.com/?affid=your_id” alt=”” />
This will force a cookie from your affiliate onto their pc. Now if they decide to close their browser, come back in a few hours can go to your affiliate website. You will still get credit for it.
There are several downfalls in just doing this directly as shown above. Alof of affiliates use banners. They compare your banner impressions to your clicks. This is called a Click through Ratio. If you stuff alot and dont show any banners (no banners on your site or your stuffing someone elses website/forum), you will have a CTR that is higher than 100%, which theoretically is impossible. If you have banners on your site, you will get 1 impression for every stuff. This will give you a 100% CTR. Affiliates are quick to catch on when your CTR ratio is too high. I will show you in a later blog how to defeat this method of detection.
The second way affiliates know that you are stuffing is the browser referer variable. If you decide to stuff other websites, by posting images on forums, blog comments, etc, their logs will show exactly where you stuffed at and with little reesarch, they will know that you dont run/own that website. Caught with your pants down. There are many ways to change the referer, but all ways lead to more obstacles which are even harder to fix. Because the browser is a client side value, you have to be crafty in your methods. I will describe a few ways people hide their referers from affiliates in a future blog. For now, just know that it involves alot of redirection, url manipulation, and a touch of htaccess and php coding.
Thats it for todays blog, hope you learned a little bit more about cookie stuffing as next week, we will touch on more advanced topics.
