I have about 10 active affiliate sites with about 2000 pages. Most of these pages include some sort of textual affiliate link. The CMS's I use are Wordpress and CMS Made Simple, but some of the sites are also built with Dreamweaver.
Now, the problem is, that updating these links is a pain even in a normal day. But now, one of the networks I use updated they whole system which resulted in a huge amount of dead links scattered around hundreds of pages. This has left me wanting for a more time-effective solution.
For Wordpress, I have used some link cloakers with centralized admin systems and they are definitely a step in the right direction. However, with these, there is still no way to insert automatically those 1-pixel tracking images for cookie insertion.
The optimal solution (in my opinion) would be a software that would:
1. Replace landing page URL with affiliate URL before the page would be sent to client. I would build all of my links normally but if an affiliate link exists, this would be inserted to the page when it is loaded.
2. After the link a tracking image would be inserted.
3. All of the affiliate URL's could be managed in a centralized database.
4. A cron job would check at certain interval if the affiliate link is still alive. If it is not, an alert will be raised by e-mail. The checking will happen by the cron job going to the link, following all redirects and checking if the final landing page matches the landing page on database.
And, to improve CTR, all of the affiliate links could be cloaked (/out/merchant1 etc.). To make everything even more beautiful, an outgoing click event tracker could be used. Also, the system could even automatically insert subid tracking.
Of course, I could just use /out/merchant links all the time, but this would still leave me hanging with the "iSales" or tracking pixels.
Now, this being the Internets, there has to be other people who have had and have effectively solved this problem. Are you guys aware of any software / solutions to this type of problems?
Now, the problem is, that updating these links is a pain even in a normal day. But now, one of the networks I use updated they whole system which resulted in a huge amount of dead links scattered around hundreds of pages. This has left me wanting for a more time-effective solution.
For Wordpress, I have used some link cloakers with centralized admin systems and they are definitely a step in the right direction. However, with these, there is still no way to insert automatically those 1-pixel tracking images for cookie insertion.
The optimal solution (in my opinion) would be a software that would:
1. Replace landing page URL with affiliate URL before the page would be sent to client. I would build all of my links normally but if an affiliate link exists, this would be inserted to the page when it is loaded.
2. After the link a tracking image would be inserted.
3. All of the affiliate URL's could be managed in a centralized database.
4. A cron job would check at certain interval if the affiliate link is still alive. If it is not, an alert will be raised by e-mail. The checking will happen by the cron job going to the link, following all redirects and checking if the final landing page matches the landing page on database.
And, to improve CTR, all of the affiliate links could be cloaked (/out/merchant1 etc.). To make everything even more beautiful, an outgoing click event tracker could be used. Also, the system could even automatically insert subid tracking.
Of course, I could just use /out/merchant links all the time, but this would still leave me hanging with the "iSales" or tracking pixels.
Now, this being the Internets, there has to be other people who have had and have effectively solved this problem. Are you guys aware of any software / solutions to this type of problems?