Newbie Cloaking Question

Hey guys,

I'm looking into ways to drive more clicks to my affiliate links and have used cloaking to get my FB ad's approved. FB recognizes my website as the source, which is great, but my affiliate tracker shows the source of the clicks coming from FB.

Is there any way to get around this to show the traffic coming from my site instead? Any other recommendations for this type of thing?

Thanks for the help!

lbteam said:

I'm looking into ways to drive more clicks to my affiliate links and have used cloaking to get my FB ad's approved.

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Are you saying that the URL that you give FB is that of a cloaker, and then the cloaker redirects to your landing page? And what are you trying to cloak against exactly?

FB recognizes my website as the source

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I'm lost. I would imagine that FB is the source of your traffic, no?

Hey, Yes - so in this case I am cloaking an affiliate link, and since it redirects to the affiliate website, I want to make sure that redirect referral shows as coming from my website, not FB.

Maybe there is a better way to do that but that's the goal.

lbteam said:

Hey, Yes - so in this case I am cloaking an affiliate link, and since it redirects to the affiliate website, I want to make sure that redirect referral shows as coming from my website, not FB.

Maybe there is a better way to do that but that's the goal.

Click to expand...

Ok, so there's several things here.

1- What is the redirect method that you're using? Not sure if you're aware, but for example a 302 redirect carries the referer through. That means that if you put your link cloaker on Facebook and the referer is set on FB, then the landing page after the redirect will also have FB as the referer.

2- You can't choose the referer as you wish. Browsers follow a set of policies to determine when to set a referer to what. It's not under the server control, it's ultimately what the browser decides that counts. The best you can do is learn those policies and try to play the browsers to do what you want. So, is it possible to set the referer to be your website? Well, depends on how your cloaker works. When you say cloaker, do you mean a link shortener that does conditional redirects? If that's what you're using, you can't get the shortener to set the referer to your website.

3- Can I ask why you're trying to get the referral to show as your website? If you're an affiliate, attribution should depend on your affiliate ID, not the referral, right? I'm asking because the details of the solution will depend on what you're trying to achieve.

Wanna skype about this?

Depending on your cloaker - just spoof your referrer as your site. Most decent cloakers offer that functionality.

why not run it through a simple redirector?