BU810

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

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.

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?

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.

It’s not a specific proxy. I just use torbrowser and keep refreshing identities until I get one in a country with an affiliate program and then see if the links match.

I just installed Amazon Affiliate Link Localizer on another site that has W3 Total Cache running and it does work. I am convinced that what happened was that earlier on the other site I just got a bad proxy or didn’t wait long enough for everything to load so I thought the plugin failed when it actually worked. Anyway this is good news. Thanks for all your responses.

Adventurenick, thanks for the response.

I may have been wrong all along. I think link localizer is working even with W3 Total Cache activated. I may have been misled the whole time because when I tested it with the cache on either I got one of those odd proxies that doesn’t work for the test or I didn’t wait long enough for everything to load before seeing if the links changed. So I thought it didn’t work. Then when I deactivated the cache it seemed to work so I thought that was the problem. But it may have just been a fluke thing in the first place.

Anyway, at this point it seems to work with W3 Total Cache.

I was going to set the cache not to minify the Affiliate Link Localizer js file as you said, Nick, just to be sure. But when I went into the settings there was no place to name specific js files to exclude. That’s probably because this site is on an older version of WP with an older version of W3. Perhaps in newer versions of W3 there is a place to exclude specific js files. I tried to upgrade W3 and that just led to all kinds of problems. So I had to put it back to the old version of W3.

At this point, I am pretty sure W3 is running and the link localizer is also working.

It’s very hard to test what’s working on our end as you’ve seen since proxies are so inconsistent and I don’t know any other way to test well without a friend on the other side of the pond.

I don’t know that I’d say the cache plugin is “breaking things.” I assumed there is just something in how caches work in general that your plugin doesn’t account for. Didn’t I see you mention somewhere that it has to do with how the caches compress or something like that?

In any case, I could be wrong but it seems more like something the link localizer would have to adapt to rather than the caches be able to adapt to.

But I’d really like to hear others’ opinions on this. There must be others who really need to localize links and use caches both. Maybe if there were enough of us we could chip in and pay you something for your time.

Thanks for checking Pete. I appreciate it. Looks like it’s working fine then. Now my only concern is caching.

It would be so great to find a cache plugin that is known to work with the link localizer.

This seems to me like a very important issue. I would use this plugin on all my sites. But if it can’t be used with a cache (preferably W3 Total Cache) then it means I really can’t use it on sites that otherwise load too slowly. Page speed not only affects user experience, but even affects your site’s rankings. So this would leave us having to choose between localizing the links and site speed, but not able to have both.

I certainly understand you can only do what you have time for. But I would think this is a priority.

Is anyone else also concerned about this? How are you dealing with it?

With W3TC deactivated it did work for me. So that’s no longer a problem. The problem now is just that I apparently have to choose between being able to localize my links and having a cache.

Am testing for other countries by just using proxies with IP’s in those countries.

OK once I deactivated W3 Total Cache it worked.

So is there no way to use this with a cache? It’s kind of frustrating having to choose between converting international Amazon traffic or having a reasonable site speed.

What is people’s advice on this dilemma?

Will Amazon Affiliate Link Localizer still not work with W3 Total Cache? Or have updates made it so these can now work together?