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SafariNow How Linking Works HOW LINKING WORKS

At SafariNow we make use of clean linking.

What Is Clean Linking?

Clean links are simply links that are untagged ie they do not contain any AffiliateID tags. We can track affiliate referrals without the need for a query string (based on the URL of the referring website).

How Do We Do It? (In English!)

  • You provide us with any domain name(s) that you will be linking to us from, here.
  • When a user browses to our site, we check to see if they came from one of your domains. If so, we put a cookie on their machine to store this information.
  • When this user makes their first enquiry through our system (on the same day or months later), we flag their account as being referred by you.
  • This flag stays in our database forever and cannot be changed.

How Do We Do It? (Tech Talk)

  • We check the referring url whenever a new session starts (and also on every visit to our homepage).
  • We determine the referring url by using the 'referrer_url' environment variable provided by the browser software.
  • Cookies expire if the user goes 3 months without visiting our site.
  • New referral cookies replace older ones (until the user signs up, at which point cookies become irrelevant).

What Is The Benefit Of Clean Linking?

  • You could be losing business without knowing it! Approximately 10-15% of users will try to circumvent your link as soon as it becomes apparent that you are trying to make money from their clicks, in the hope of getting a better deal by going direct to the source. This will deny you & us commission. The way users can check this is to hover over your link. If the link is not clean, your Affiliate ID tags will showin the status bar - thus indicating that you are tracking the user's click.
  • If the AffiliateID is not incorporated correctly into a link, clicks will either be incorrectly tracked or take the user to a 404 Page Not Found error!
  • Search engines see clean links from relevant source as having a higher value than a 'dirty' affiliate link.

What If I Am Using Tagged Links?

It would be preferable to update to clean links for the reasons set out above. We apologize for the inconvenience, but it is worth the effort!

How Do I Check What Referral Cookies Are On My Machine?

To see what referral cookie (if any) is on your machine:

Note » Most pages will only check for referals on session start, but this test referral page will always check for referrals.

Note » Click-throughs will only appear in your click-through stats if they occurred on session start.

Linking Profiles

You can have multiple skins & multiple websites. Just enter them here


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