hi david
i was looking at one of my sites today and noticed, that my PT says ive had about 2050 clicks but comparing to the network they say only 134 clicks? how can i monitor this and what is the right figure.
thanks
Hi David,
out of 8 sites that I am running, I also have the same problem with just one site. It shows something like 125,000 plus clicks but I have only had a couple of hundred clicks in total (across 8 sites) according to the figures given by Afiliate Window. I have the robots.txt in place and it reads as above.
Any other suggestions ?
Also, is there anyway that clicks can be tracked ?
Thanks.
Hi Perce,
That would sound like the site showing the increased click count has been crawled by something that wasn't respecting robots.txt. That would almost certainly have been a "one off", so what you could do is reset all click counts for that installation with the following dbmod.php script (upload to and run from the main installation folder, and then delete):
<?php
require("includes/common.php");
$sql = "UPDATE `".$config_databaseTablePrefix."feeds` SET clicks = '0'";
database_queryModify($sql,$result);
print "Done.";
?>
Regarding click tracking, sure, many users do this using the Text After filter to append an appropriate tracking parameter to the Buy URL field (in accordance with click tracking instructions from the relevant affiliate network). Affiliate Window supports a tracking parameter called "clickref", so to identify clicks as coming from a specific site, you could add a Text After filter to the Buy URL field for a feed and in the text box on the configuration page for the filter enter:
&clickref=SITENAME...where SITENAME is the tracking parameter that you wish to use. Don't forget to re-import after modifying filters as they are only applied at import time...
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
David.
--
PriceTapestry.com
Hi David, thanks for the suggestion but i don't think that's the answer as I've used that reset script a couple of times already. Any other ideas ?
Thanks.
Hi Perce,
Could you check that robots.txt, which must go in the top level is adjusted correctly if Price Tapestry is installed into a sub-directory, for example if Price Tapestry is installed in the /comparison/ folder then robots.txt would need to contain:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /comparison/jump.php
etc.
Apologies if that's not the issue but just thinking through anything it could be...!
Cheers,
David.
--
PriceTapestry.com
Hi Paul,
That sounds like crawlers requesting your jump.php file - make sure that jump.php (if using tracking) is excluded in your robots.txt - I know you have been a user for a long time but more recent distributions include a recommended robots.txt file, currently:
User-agent: *Disallow: /categories.php
Disallow: /brands.php
Disallow: /reviews.php
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /brand/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /jump.php
This ensures that the merchant index (the only one that is guaranteed to link to all products) is available, but the category, brand and jump.php page is not...
Cheers,
David.
--
PriceTapestry.com