7) Redirect Your Landing Pages To Clean URLS: In Step 7 of your campaign setup (#7 Get Links), you would normally generate your ad (or keyword) destination URL. The problem with this though is that the variables in the URL (t202id, t202kw), etc…can give a lot away about your campaign structure.
This is especially true if you also use a tool such as Speed PPC in conjunction with Prosper202, which can add even more tokens to the URL (seed, adgroup, keywordtype, etc).
For example, take a URL such as:
“http://www.yourdomain.com/landingpage.php?t202id=1234&t202kw={keyword}&seed=seedkeyword&adgroup=adgroupname&match=broad”
If I saw this URL in the address bar of a landing page, I immediately know:
You’re using Prosper202 to track your conversions = potential profitable affiliate
You’re passing the bidded keyword in the URL {keyword}, which obviously reveals the actual terms you are bidding on.
Tokens like “seed or adgroup” reveal that you are probably using Speed PPC, shows the campaign structure, and the matchtype (broad) being triggered for the search.
This is simply much more campaign information than I want to reveal to my competitors. So using a few tricks, we can still capture the key tracking information, and then redirect the user to a clean URL like:
“
404 - Not Found
(I gotta give props to Wes Mahler for helping me get this working)
Do the following to maintain your tracking, but redirect your destination URLS to clean (token free) URLs that spy affiliates can’t openly see:
Create a new file that will act as the redirect landing page. I suggest you name this file something like “lp1.php or landing.php” as to not alert its purposed (ie: don’t call it redirect.php)
In your new redirect landing page (we’ll use lp1.php), add the following:
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<script>code from step#6 Get LP Code goes here</script><!– js script is called, the visitor is recorded, then redirected to the clean URL –!>
<script type=”text/javascript”> window.location=’http://yourdomain.com/cleanpage.php’;</script>
</body>
</html>
In place of “cleanpage.php”, this will be the true destination where you want your visitors to ultimately end up. If it’s a directory, simply specify the directory path in the script above and add “index.php”.
Be sure to modify the Landing Page URL in Step#4 (Landing Page Setup) to reflect the path to your “lp1.php” file. For example, instead of setting the landing page URL to your former destination:
404 - Not Found, you’ll instead set it to:
404 - Not Found