Scrubbing Your Traffic with Meta Redirects
Its pretty common knowledge among the affiliate marketing industry that you have to hide your traffic sources. Regardless of of the kind of relationship that you have with your network and affiliate manager, its bad business to expose all of the search terms, traffic sources and content that you are using to actively promote a given offer. Without going into too much of the specifics on this topic, I wanted to real quickly post the method that I use to scrub the referral data from my direct linked campaigns.
In a nutshell, the script works as follows:
PPC AD –|> Redirect Domain (with this script) –|> Offer
While a lot of people advocate the need for a double meta redirect, this is simply for a direct linked campaign so I really don’t care of the network figures out my redirect domain (as this page simply 301s to an offer page). If you have an LP that you want to hide or don’t want to expose the original redirect, then you can simply setup a double meta redirect, which I won’t cover here.
You can pass subid’s to the script by appending ?s=BLAH to the page. For example, I’d setup the link as follows: www.myredirectdomain.com/fathersday/index.php?s=men18t20
Anyways, here ya go and hope that some of you find this useful 
<?
$offer = "http://www.incentaclick.com/nclick.php?id=11323&cid=4339";
if (isset($_GET['s'])) $offer = $offer . “&sub=” . $_GET['s'];
if(isset($_GET['go'])) $go = $_GET['go'];
if ($_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"] && $go) {
//This means we tried the redirect and it failed.
//We can try another redirect, or simply display a text link
//like this code does.
echo “<center><a href=’$offer’>Please click here to continue.</a></center>”;
return;
}
else if ($_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]) {
//User has not yet been to this page (because $go) isn’t set, so well
//do the meta redirect.
$me = “http://” . $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
echo “<html>\n<head>\n<title>Page Loading…</title>\n”;
echo “<meta http-equiv=\”refresh\” content=\”1;url=”;
// Way of keeping subids in tact … works for my setup, may not
// work for all … I setup my links as www.mydomain.com/?sub=blah
if (stristr($me, “?”)) echo “$me&go=1″;
else echo “$me?go=1″;
echo “\”></head><body></body></html>”;
}
else {
//No referer is set so no need to fuck with meta redirects.
//Simply forward the user.
header(”Location: $offer”);
}
?>
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May 27th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Thanks mate! If we are using a landing page can we set up this script on a separate domain and make our offer link to it or do you suggest sticking with double meta redirect?
May 27th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Hey Neil -
Either option will work… I try and send all my traffic through the same script/domain as it makes aggregating my own internal statistics MUCH easier. The DMR is really only used to hide the originating redirect page. This allows your competitors or the aff networks from ‘reverse engineering’ your traffic. If they see that you sent a few users from redirect1.com, then they may look for that domain in the serps, on facebook, etc. However, if you are using a DMR and you send redirect2.com -> redirect1.com -> offer, then they’re gonna have a pretty tough time finding redirect1.com from the outside if its the page leaking referrals. Hope that helps.