I have been, or can be if you click on a link and make a purchase, compensated via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value for writing this post. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.
About a month ago an offer that I was promoting really dropped off. The merchant insisted nothing was wrong, but I didn’t believe them, for very good reason. While this merchant and I have a great relationship, I had customers clicking through with very high intent-to-purchase keywords, and not converting. Luckily, this particular merchant was on two different networks, so I was able to deep-link to get 2 cookies set.
Let’s take 1&1 Internet as an example – on both CJ & Pepperjam. The basic CJ link is http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-2741147-10505076, and the basic Pepperjam link is http://www.gopjn.com/t/2-6273-19981-327.
So on the CJ link, I set the Destination URL to be the Pepperjam link, and come up with http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-2741147-10505076?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gopjn.com%2Ft%2F2-6273-19981-327
This month alone, 13.86% of my revenue for this one merchant came from the “backup” tracking system.
Originally I set this up as a test, but I’ve kept it in place to capture those would-be-lost sales. If you wanted to go nuts, you could set three cookies, but the time to go from click to landing page could be long.