Links not Changing

Nick,

I’ve seen the same but not on the US site. On the US site I’m seeing similar numbers still to before since activating the plugin. But, on some of the European affiliate programs and on Canada I’m suddenly seeing hundreds of clicks per day.

I’m also very confused as to why that’s happening.

I don’t know if it’s a problem that we’d have trouble with in terms of being punished by the programs or kicked out. But it sure will make it impossible to accurately track conversion rates.

I’d love to find out what is going on with these incredibly high click numbers.

Very weird indeed, glad I’m not the only one which might make it harder to figure out. The click rate showing up on amazon seems like it might actually correspond with the number of page views. I know there’s no way that a few thousand people all clicked the Amazon links yesterday. It shows about 2400 clicks on the US links yesterday – the pages with the Amazon links did get around that many page loads yesterday, so could the script somehow be making a page load count as a click?

I doubt it’s actually placing an Amazon cookie on all these “clicks” since I didn’t see any corresponding rise in purchases. I guess we’ll see tomorrow for sure.

Any ideas Pete? Hopefully Amazon won’t think this is some effort to game the system

Nick,

I also assumed that it must be showing clicks for impressions.

If you look at your Amazon Associates reports you can look in more detail at things like what link types it’s counting clicks on. For me, all the huge number of clicks are on the link types called “Basic Display – Detail Page.” Interestingly, under impressions for this type of link it says N/A and Amazon doesn’t track the impressions on this type of link unless you install a script to have it do so.

So I wonder if, since it doesn’t track impressions on these, it’s just counting them as clicks instead or something.

I’m also confused as to what these “Basic Display – Detail Page” links are. I think they may be the ones where you have a little graphic showing the product with price information under it. If so it would make sense. I have a bunch of those on one of my sites, several on some pages. So if it’s just counting every load of one that could add up quickly.

This doesn’t explain why my US Amazon affiliate account is not full of these massive numbers, while others are though.

How does this compare to the details of your situation, Nick?

Like you, I’m seeing the biggest number of clicks for Basic Display – Detail Page. There are a few Recommended Product Links banners on the site, but most of the Amazon links are in the text.

I have another site that has a few Amazon Affiliate links on it and a separate tracking ID but isn’t using the Amazon Link Localizer plugin so I looked at the separate reports for both tracking IDs and there was a huge jump in clicks that began on the 9th for both of them, so it looks like Amazon Link Localizer might not have anything to do with this odd rise in clicks.

My small blog that isn’t running this plugin went from about a dozen clicks a day to several hundred clicks a day beginning on the 9th and increasing on the 10th and 11th. Looks like maybe Amazon has just made some kind of internal change in how they calculate clicks – whatever the change is, it’s very weird, since I know my small blog isn’t getting much traffic at all. I will see what happens over the weekend

Sounds good. You could always contact one of the affiliate programs where it’s happening too and ask.

Another idea occurred to me. When our page loads, it first loads the American Amazon link. The plugin then takes their IP and actually goes and looks up whether the product exists and has the same ASIN in their country before deciding what link to change it to on our site. Perhaps it’s these lookups by the plugin, when determining the best replacement link, that are being counted as clicks? Pete could probably say if that’s a possibility.

There are lookups made in the background but the script is meant to strip your affiliate ID out of these. Can you guys post links to the sites you’re having this problem on and I’ll check if that’s working properly.

I wouldn’t try and contact Amazon about it, as I have no ide whether they’d approve of this script or not!

@bu810

could be, I just updated my previous post though because I noticed the same dramatic rise in clicks beginning on the 9th on my other site that isn’t using this plugin and uses a separate tracking ID. So, perhaps it’s entirely coincidental that we happened to start using Amazon Link Localizer around the same time the click numbers started climbing for no reason.

Pete, I’ll email you the link to the site collecting huge numbers of clicks ok?

Pete, I’ll email you the link to the site collecting huge numbers of clicks ok?

Nick,

I can’t see it being a coincidence. I’ve been in the Canada program for a while. Very few clicks, but a few here and there. The very day I added this plugin it immediately went up to hundreds of clicks. And also seeing all those clicks on other countries only accessed by the plugin. Meanwhile my American clicks did not go up like yours.

Wait, I just remembered. The site that is having all of these clicks is not one with the plugin but one where I used the manual javascript because it’s not a WordPress site. Does that make a difference, Pete?

Looks like maybe some kind of glitch going on for other Amazon Associates:

https://forums.prospero.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=am-associhelp&msg=42533.1&ctx=0

Very interesting. Except mine isn’t double the clicks. I’m getting hundreds, even thousands of clicks on these foreign Amazon accounts where I doubt I actually had even a single click the day I just set it up. Maybe I had 1 or 2 if lucky. So even if some people are seeing a weird glitch with double, that wouldn’t come close to explaining this extreme.

Uh oh. In the thread Nick linked to someone said in the Euro programs if you drop under 1% conversion you get kicked out of the program. Well with these hundreds of clicks out of nowhere, there’s no chance I’ll get even close to 1%. I hope this isn’t true.

BU810 – yes that could well be the difference actually. The non-wordpress version isn’t as up to date as the wordpress version so it may be missing the part of the code that strips the affiliate IDs from lookups. I’ll check later and let you know.