Cloaking - absolutely necessary?

AffApprentice

AffApprentice

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Nov 19, 2009
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I have a theory that the added latency caused by the tracking / cloaking software I'm using (Prosper202 - adds an additional redirect when links are clicked) is costing me conversions. However, I'm afraid to test the theory because if I just put my affiliate links in redirect.php's on my domain I _think_ (not sure) my network will be able to see the source of my traffic, and I've heard that's very bad.

What do you think I should do? Maybe a good compromise is to put my redirect.php's on a dummy domain? Not sure if that will help the speed of the redirect though...
 


That additional redirect should take about 0.1 seconds unless you're on some Indonesian shared hosting or something.

EDIT: Unless you're talking about a double meta refresh? (referer blanking)
 
actually, if you get some bullshit shared hosting, its a HUGE difference. the redirect can take 2-3 seconds. so yes maybe you should look into other hosting.
 
doesn't matter how fast your server is/are, cloaking is done with user's browser. So user with ie6 + crappy PC will experience some speed issue when page is being redirect with java/refresh.
 
I have a campaign where I don't care if the advertiser see's my traffic or not. I ran the ad cloaked for nearly 3 months, I removed the cloaks just to save the customer that half a second refresh, and I saw a consistent 6% increase in conversions (daily average)... this campaign has now been running for 8 months. (In prosper, turned cloaking off for the offer).

This is on a dedicated server, with memcache and cached redirects, on a 100mbit pipe. Don't know if the cloaking was really the culprit but I haven't put it back on to see if I lose 6% again.
 
Yes, I am on "bullshit shared hosting" :)

And right after I wrote this post, I tried running my campaign with P202 disabled and saw an increase in conversions. Nothing statistically significant, but I'm definitely starting to think that until I'm on a dedicated server I should switch to the hosted T202 so that I don't have to worry that my tracking software is costing me conversions...
 
Not sure how much traffic you are doing but Prosper202 redirects will naturally degrade over time unless you perform some database maintenance. Primarily the size of the database affects the performance dramatically with large databases taking a full 5-8 seconds to complete!

You can setup some cron jobs that export the data in the larger tables for archiving then truncate the tables to improve performance.
 
wheinrome said:
Not sure how much traffic you are doing but Prosper202 redirects will naturally degrade over time unless you perform some database maintenance. Primarily the size of the database affects the performance dramatically with large databases taking a full 5-8 seconds to complete!
Click to expand...

Is this still the case if you have a VPS/Dedicated Server with horizontal partitioning?
 
interesting...i was thinking the same thing about my p202 redirects just a few days ago. im running on a dedicated server but was wondering how it affected conversions. im gonna give this a shot.
 
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