( Following on from
http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread...threadid=27702 )
I my previous tests I've mainly looked at keywords used on 180 that match UK merchant's domains, which was about 500 keywords. To get a more complete picture, over the last couple of weeks I've done a scan of 372,637 keywords and recorded details of what adverts will show. 94,746 of the keywords were returning an advert to show.
Then I wrote a crawler that would visit these urls and see if they were forcing clicks thru affiliate links via redirects, meta, refreshes, frames, iframes or javascript. These methods are often used by affiliates to try to hide their links - not that it helps!
There is a slim chance that the crawler might have found a link that a click isn't forced thru. On speaking to some networks it seems that using 180 is frowned upon even if it doesn't force a cookie to be set. If I do any future tests I will expand the crawler so it also reports pages that just show affiliate links.
This will be nowhere near complete results, as one keyword can show multiple adverts and 180 seems to control the rate it will show ads to one user, but it should be a fair random sample.
Affiliate Future
I found 70 links comprising 2 Affiliate IDs (AIDs) linking to 40 Merchant IDs (MIDs) via 180. The 1 AID targets 3 MIDs, the other targets 38 MIDs - this is the affilliate from
this thread.
Affiliate Window
Found 63 links comprising 3 AIDs linking to 29 MIDs. In my previous post I mentioned an affiliate reported to Alan Totten. This affiliate is no longer active, but I'm not sure if that is because of actions by AWin or because, as I understand it, they have been removed from other networks for using 180.
Buy.at
Found nothing
Commission Junction
Since my last post CJ have said they have made using 180 against the Code of Conduct. As these tests were started before that, and CJ will take a little time to remove everyone, I still found 540 links containing 36 Site IDs. Hopefully this will change shortly.
DGM
Found 148 links comprising 6 AIDs linking to 43 MIDs. In my opinion they are probably the worst affected from an affiliates view point with one AID broadly targeting their links. As this affiliate is just sealing other affiliates commissions, so not making more override for DGM, I can't see why they are still active 3 months after being reported. I can only think DGM are only seeing the ££££'s in this affiliate's account and can't see that they would be getting these sales even if that affiliate was removed.
Online Media Group
I found one affiliate using 180 to send traffic to a page that displayed an OMG link in a frame, which I couldn't detect before. OMG have delt with this.
Paid on Results
Found nothing
Tradedoubler
First off, I spoke with Nick Roveta on Friday and it sounds like he is keen to get things tidyed up. Like CJ I will still report what I've found as it shows why they need to act.
Found 1975 links (2% of all 180 adverts) comprising 27 AIDs linking to 143 MIDs. AIDs that seem, sometimes loosely, connected to a few ads hosted on 180's servers (showing
TD iframes) combine to 72% of these links.
Zanox
Found 632 links but I'm unable to get any further details because of the link format.
Netklix
I didn't find as many links as I expected after seeming to have lots of Dating Direct popups. Found 6 links pointing to 3 locations.
If any of the above networks want me to send them an Excel spreadsheet containg the triggers that were used in 180, the advert urls that were shown and the affiliate link that were triggered for their network, then please post.
Full 180 Scan
Linear Mode
