'persistent' ap_id after first click

[sparkit]

hi, i am trying to figure out a relatively simple way to track users and was wondering if you have suggestions.

basically if an affiliate gives out a link to a particular signup page and the end user fills the form in, all is great: tracking is done and all are happy.

however, users are users: sometimes they might navigate somewhere else and then go back to the signup page, however the tracking code is lost at this point. i have looked into the option of creating cookies, but i’m wondering whether the plugin already uses some session monitoing to keep hold of the tracking and therefore i don’t actually need to reinvent the wheel, just access the right cookie or session variable…

any useful suggestion will be very welcome!

[amin007]

Once the user land on the signup page the affiliate plugin will drop a cookie. At this point the user can go to other pages but the tracking will still happen.

[sparkit]

thanks for confirming this as it was what i understood the plugin was going to do, however it doesn’t seem to be what the plugin actually does (note i have the latest version of WP 3.1 and the latest version of the plugin).

can you please tell me where the cookie is set? i can then run a few checks to see where the info is lost and give you more debugging info.

the reason why i am asking is that it doesn’t look from the admin table nor the affiliate side that all clicks are registered (as i thought it would happen)

a separate ‘display’ question is: am i right in believing that the last 20 clicks that affiliates can see only include the ‘direct’ refererrals? (i’m assuming not, but what i observe is the consequence of missing recorded clicks)

i have looked at the actual database and it looks to me like only the first click is recorded, not all clicktrhough. at this point this is an unexpected problem

thanks!

[sparkit]

i know we are on a different timezone so you will probably get to my message at some point later. in the meantime, i thought to let you know that i have used a workaround to ‘rewrite’ all links with javascript. so if there is an ap_id in the url i use that to attach it as parameter to all links when the page loads, otherwise a default affiliate_id is used.

this is quite simple yet nifty as basically no code change is required from the plugin side. the js is embedded in the header of the theme and all is done!

[amin007]

FYI – The value is stored in a cookie variable named “ap_id”. All you gotta do is check the cookie value as you browse different pages and see where it gets lost.

[Author]

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