Hide the Referral Analytics on your tracking domain!
Posted by Riley | Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Privacy, Tracking | Posted on May 27th, 2010
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Here recently a buddy of mine hit me up on AIM and say hey man, I see that you’re running X offer on Y traffic source. I asked him how he knew and he said he simply looked at the referral analytics on my tracking domain. Even though the data was’t current, it was dead on about what I was running at one time and made it made me a pretty penny. I’m glad that he and I are good friends and gave me the 411 so I could remedy the situation.
So if you go over to Quantcast.com, Compete.com or Alexa.com and throw in a tracking domain you can easily see where some of its traffic may be coming from. There are a couple ways you can hide your information, but the way I prefer to do it is below. I’m a newb and don’t use any other tools similar to this. So if there are other tools, you may want to also hide your data on those sites too. You should also post a comment listing similar sites so I can do the same.
One way is to sign up to Quantcast.com and choose which parameters are available for viewing to others. On Compete.com your best bet is to email their support team and let them know you don’t want your domain’s data to be public information. They might fight with you about this. If they do, politely inform them that this is an ad serving and tracking domain and that you would very much appreciate it if they could unpublish the results for your domain when they release their data for the coming month. Finally you have Alexa.com. All you have to do is look at the Clickstream for that particular domain and all I’m gonna say is good luck getting them to remove your information. I have yet to make this happen and they seem hell bent on not removing any data. I’m to the point to where I will be talking to my attorney shortly to see if there’s anything I can possibly do.
Does anybody know any other domains that track referrers and display the information to the public? Care to post it in the comments?
Better yet, do you know a way to get Alexa to hide your Clickstream? Let a brother know!
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Wow, you really can see EVERYTHING.
Thanks for the notification, I’m going to try to lock this down.
Riley – We are a group of people who are seeking legal advice on this and are advised that we can, in all probability, prosecute – and, believe me, we will.
Or you could just block those 3 via htaccess… 3 seconds and much easier than signing up and emailing them…
Would that stop how those sites collect the data to show up in their results though?
I’m not sure it would stop Alexa from gathering information on computers that have their toolbar installed. Then again, I know very little about .htaccess.
I have Alexa blocked using robots.txt and they still have my information.
have you tried this?
http://masterlesssamurai.com/ppc/tips-tricks/prosper202-self-hosted-apps-10-best-practices-to-securing-your-prosper202-installation/
Yes, thanks for pointing that out though. I’m sure there are others who haven’t implemented these features.
Sometimes you just can’t stop the Internet. If you find a way to block it, they will just find another to get at the data.
wow dude. way to be 6 months behind everything. even worse, your letting all your NEwb friends know. just quit.
I guess I’m a newb who didn’t think about this. Good thing I never use Prosper.
OMG, everyone now knows that I buy traffic from facebook ads….
On a serious note, unless you are buying traffic from an uber-secret source, you shouldn’t be worried. Like adbrite, pof, facebook and couple other are universal, so to speak. Don’t think you should be all worked up over that!
What a great resource!
wow dude. way to be 6 months behind everything. even worse, your letting all your NEwb friends know. just quit.
this post is very usefull thx!
this post is very usefull thx!
On a serious note, unless you are buying traffic from an uber-secret source, you shouldn’t be worried. Like adbrite, pof, facebook and couple other are universal, so to speak. Don’t think you should be all worked up over that!
+1
nice post. thanks.
On a serious note, unless you are buying traffic from an uber-secret source, you shouldn’t be worried. Like adbrite, pof, facebook and couple other are universal, so to speak. Don’t think you should be all worked up over that!
+1
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