Yet Again - Income Access based advertiser links don't work

[webanalysissolutions]

Just done a review of our thousands of links in our database, and guess what?, yet again we find hundreds linking to the bog standard Income Access "invalid link" page. This happens when an advertiser based on Income Access is allowed to drop/delete/disable/inactivate - whatever you want to call it, a link in the system. This then means that affiliates lose tracking.

Advertisers will tell you that it's valid functionality - because old events need to be de-linked/disabled, but the preferred solution would be to redirect these links to a working link.

I'm not going to name any advertisers, as discussions are best done in private, but in general the Income Access system still proves second rate, and allows these discrepancies. Poor show.

So, affiliates - check all your income access links. Write code to detect if a link is clicked on and goes to a VALID html page which contains the text "Invalid Link", then log it, do something about it, delete the link that isn't working.

My advice - mask all your links - for example http://www.yoursite.com/incomeaccess-advertiser/ then link this to the underlying Income Access tracking link. This way, if the link in the future doesn't work, then you just redirect http://www.yoursite.com/incomeaccess-advertiser/ to your preferred advertiser.

We've just switched over several hundred links this evening that have been disabled by advertisers to their competitors.

I did try to contact Louis at Income Acces, but ironically his page shows a server down message! Oh dear.

#frustrated #abouttodropanyadvertiserusingIncomeAccess

Louis - Skype me - that is, if Skype is working for you.

http://incomeaccess.com/about-income...e-access-team/

Service Unavailable

Server currently undergoing maintenance. Webmaster: please contact support.

[Louis - Income Access]

Happy Friday Matt

Did you Skype me? I'm online at the moment didn't see a message from you.

We're actually moving the company sites to new servers - we figured most people would be off enjoying egg nog and caroling by now. Good to see I'm not the only one still on the clock.

In terms of the campaign links - if you want to send me a list of the ones you found I can take this a step further and escalate with the affiliate managers who work for the brands in question. As I mentioned before, we're actively trying to educate against disabling any links for landing pages and campaigns that are still live. This feature is only meant to be used in the case of a sudden shut down, for example for regulatory reasons a brand needs to stop all traffic immediately or face fines.

Ping me if you want to chat.

Cheers

[webanalysissolutions]

I would send you the links Louis, but I've sent them direct to the advertisers in question, as I did several months ago, but none of them listened, and none of them did anything differently, and they're still allowed to disable links using your software. I'm actually not even going to raise the issue any more - i'm simply going to redirect these links to an advertiser's competitors, as many other affiliates i've spoken to are already doing without publicly raising the issue.

As I said in my previous post - easy solution for me is to redirect all Income Access "invalid link" links to bet365 or someone similar who I'm going to make money from. This way is punishes advertisers for disabling links and making them redundant. That's business I'm afraid - the solution i've put in place is the one Income Access should be developing - to redirect to the correct advertiser who has disabled links.

Apologies for the frustration, but there comes a point on the last Friday evening before Christmas where you don't want to be manually deleting links from an advertiser who has disabled links in your system without a care in the world, so you just put in an automated solution yourself Happy days, looking forward to profiting from all those invalid links now that they're directing to competitors over the busy festive period! Cheers!

[webanalysissolutions]

If any affiliate reading this has the same issue in that Income Access based advertiser links are directing to "Invalid Page" because they have been disabled/deleted/made redundant in the Income Access system - we would be happy to give you free advice from our company to help you bypass these useless links and direct them to something more useful for you.

PM me or skype "windrawwin". Certainly from our perspective it's saved us more than 100 useless click throughs per day that we've now redirected to sites that make us revenue.

Remember, any link you put out there on the web may be around for many years, so don't assume that because an event has passed or because a link may no longer be valid that it isn't going to make you money. We've seen some surprising stats on old links that still continue to make us money when posted on other sites, forums, shared and retweeted on social media etc etc.

[webanalysissolutions]

In terms of the campaign links - if you want to send me a list of the ones you found I can take this a step further and escalate with the affiliate managers who work for the brands in question.

Why don't you run a link checker against all the campaign links in the Income Access system for all advertisers you host, and check to see which ones result in the "invalid link" page. This would be a lot easier than asking me for a very small subset of the larger problem wouldn't it?

[Louis - Income Access]

Hi Matt

The problem with us running a list of the links that have been disabled is that we don't get the context with which they are disabled - so there would be no way for us to differentiate the links which were disabled with proper process (informing affiliates, confirming they have switched links, then disabling), vs those that were disabled otherwise.

We have a long history of working with affiliates and operators to resolve issues. I'd be happy to work with you to find a solution that is mutually beneficial. You have my contact info on Skype, phone and email (sent in a PM a while ago) which you can use to reach out.

Happy Holidays

[TheGooner]

The problem with us running a list of the links that have been disabled is that we don't get the context with which they are disabled - so there would be no way for us to differentiate the links which were disabled with proper process (informing affiliates, confirming they have switched links, then disabling), vs those that were disabled otherwise.

Wrong response Louis.

I was going to let this go - as I marked it down as a client issue - and that Income Access would NOT have any way to detect bad links - but based on your response you clearly do.

It would be FAR better to re-route bad links to a default catchall landing page for the client - thus serving both your clients AND the affiliates with a useful click - rather than let the click resolve into an ugly 404 error.

How hard is it to have the client set up a default landing page that can continue to potentially process the player click - and have a report available online for both clients and affiliates so that they can see the number of links (and type of links) that are ending there.

Surely that's a smart software solution and a win-win-win situation for client - affiliate AND Income Access?
To do less is lazy and certainly not an AWARD winning solution.

[webanalysissolutions]

I don't want to look like i'm complaining about Income Access all the time, but come on - a software provider that apparently does not have the ability to check its own database of links and check that they don't go to a page (that is hosted by themselves)? Really? That sort of makes you look more amateur than I thought you were already.

Gooner and I could probably knock up something better at the pub at LAC given our combined experience in the affiliate industry.

I agree with Gooner, and probably am thinking and saying what 100 other affiliates won't bother or want to speak out - why on earth don't we have some sort of redirect function that avoids bad links - like Gooner said, it's a win-win for everyone to stop people going to pages (that are not even 404 responses I might add, they're valid HTTP200 response pages, which makes this issue even worse and harder to detet), that just contain the HTML "Invalid Response".

Ultimately I'm asking the question because I would love to redirect old/defunct/disabled/old event links to the correct bookmaker once they are no longer valid because it makes sense to the customer to do so, rather than redirect to someone else e.g. bookmaker x has an offer on Cheltenham 2014, so naturally they provide a redirect to Cheltenham 2015 or just the horse racing page (or for God's sake, please, something that will convert better than "Invalid Link"!) that old links redirect to if clicked on.

Instead I'm putting in my own solution that takes traffic away from badly behaving bookmaker x who is using the Income Access disable function, and providing it to generic bookmaker y, who has at least some remote chance of converting.

Help! Affiliates are asking the question. Advertisers are losing money (without really knowing what they're doing), and Income Access' reputation suffers more and more. Everyone's losing here.

Why are affiliate questions always taken "offline" from forums, and then nothing comes of it? Silently hundreds of affiliates do not advertise brands because they know of the inefficiencies of doing so, but with small changes like this one then advertiser companies would achieve a lot more confidence in affiliates. And, they wonder why we all flock to the same 2 or 3 advertisers, and why they can't get top ad space on affiliate sites -take a look at how they operate their businesses.

[webanalysissolutions]

The problem with us running a list of the links that have been disabled is that we don't get the context with which they are disabled - so there would be no way for us to differentiate the links which were disabled with proper process (informing affiliates, confirming they have switched links, then disabling), vs those that were disabled otherwise.

I see what you're saying there in theory re: context - but let's face it, I've never had an email from an Income Access advertiser saying that they had deliberately disabled a link and to not use it anymore. So, context in theory, but in practice the functionality just gets used one way only.

Even if the context were true, why not just have one default link every advertiser has to set in IA, then we'd never have any invalid links, EVER.

[justbookies]

Far worse than 'invalid links' are the IA links that appear to work that don't track. I have had that twice in the past. It does not matter to me whose fault this is - Income Access's or the affiliate dept or whatever - it is bad for IA and they should ensure their systems don't allow this to happen.

In one instance the AM admitted that link "had been turned off", yet it still appeared to work as it landed on the landing page in the correct manner. That operator was thoroughly decent and compensated me four figures for the three weeks of lost referrals. Another company did a test with me and none of our test referrals appeared in the stats (including those done by the AM). The AM blamed it on their company's own "duplicate suppression" software - to stop duplicates even reaching the stats before the data got loaded. He said it may have been set too aggressively. I have no idea if that was true or not or what the upshot was their end (ie: did they set the software less aggressively?) as the AM then just went dead on the issue (too difficult to deal with). So in that case the link tracked but still the referrals did not make it to the figures.

Income Access seem run off their feet so they don't police how their system is being run. IA cant just blame operators for everything and wash their hands of it. It is IAs fault if operators are falling into traps. I just wish when that happened they did become 'invalid links', but they don't always. So if you wonder why you haven't been referring players to an operator (or less than you should have), do your own tests. Unfortunately it is not all about 'invalid links.'

Louis has addressed the issues I speak of but not really solved them as the blame just gets laid at the operators' door. Now my only recourse is to use the most obvious and prominent of the text links and nothing else. I use the ones I think are most used by other affiliates so if they stop working it wont just be me noticing a lack of referrals.

I have exchanged PMs with various affiliates about this issue. Understandably they (and me) do not want to offend either Income Access or the operators by going public all the time about these issues. As I suggested to Louis (who did try to address all my concerns when this happened a few months ago) until this issue is properly solved at IAs end and until IA take responsibility for apparent ****-ups by operators using their system then this problem will keep recurring and affiliates will keep complaining about it.

PS: I forgot to mention another instance where an operator migrated from one IA platform to another IA platform and when it went live everything appeared to work perfectly, landing pages etc. yet the tracking cookies were not as they had been before. I rang my AM there and he admitted it was "probably not tracking referrals" and not to use the links yet. So a major IA migration occurred and nobody at IA or the operator had thought to test any of it. Only in this industry.

[webanalysissolutions]

Thanks justbookies, I had the same issues with links appearing to go through and not track with several IA advertisers. It's ok to keep testing links and seeing if they work, but it's a major hassle to have to keep doing this, and you're always left with the feeling with IA that something isn't working 100%, so in our business we tend to go lightly on IA based advertisers and not rely on them too much for income.

We've now got a solution working on our side that will do exactly what is needed in the IA system - to default links that don't work to a default tracker that does, so i'm happy i caught this before the busy festive sporting period, as we'd have lost a lot of revenue from invalid links.

I've also experienced the nuances of "double counting" and other features. Two IA advertisers I know do not try to set a tracking cookie at all if they have logged that a particular IP address had a browser that did not want cookies set on a previous visit. This is yet another feature that limits referrals - consider people going through proxies and all coming from the same IP, shared computers, mobile devices that have cookies off/private by default.

All in all, you take your chances with any IA based advertiser, and I would bet my house on it that no IA advertiser is as reliable at tracking and linking as some of the most reliable advertisers in the industry.

Anyway, I'm going to stop complaining now as it IS Christmas Just a few more days work left to clean up this IA crap from our sites and get things working smoothly for the holidays.

Cheers

[universal4]

How about you encourage ALL your partners to just STOP disabling links.

At no time should ANY links be disabled, if an offer expires, bonus expires, a link or landing page makes no sense for last years super bowl, REDIRECT the link don't foolishly disable the link.

Rick
Universal4

[TheGooner]

Far worse than 'invalid links' are the IA links that appear to work that don't track. I have had that twice in the past. It does not matter to me whose fault this is - Income Access's or the affiliate dept or whatever - it is bad for IA and they should ensure their systems don't allow this to happen.

In one instance the AM admitted that link "had been turned off", yet it still appeared to work as it landed on the landing page in the correct manner.

THis is pretty close to criminal. Create a link - have it looks like it works - but never give any credit?
That would explain our BetFred falloff in stats.

Another company did a test with me and none of our test referrals appeared in the stats (including those done by the AM). The AM blamed it on their company's own "duplicate suppression" software - to stop duplicates even reaching the stats before the data got loaded. He said it may have been set too aggressively.

WTF? just WTF?

I just wish when that happened they did become 'invalid links', but they don't always. So if you wonder why you haven't been referring players to an operator (or less than you should have), do your own tests.

As discussed above - a banner should NOT default if it is invalid.

What it certainly should not do is continue to display normally - and then come up as an invalid link once clicked. I found SIX like this on our site from BetVictor today across three products. SIX BANNERS!!

You f@#ks!

PS: I forgot to mention another instance where an operator migrated from one IA platform to another IA platform and when it went live everything appeared to work perfectly, landing pages etc. yet the tracking cookies were not as they had been before. I rang my AM there and he admitted it was "probably not tracking referrals" and not to use the links yet. So a major IA migration occurred and nobody at IA or the operator had thought to test any of it.

Only in this industry.

What? Is it about time that IA gave back EVERY award they've received?

it's about time I had some serious discussions with all IA customers about flat fees I think. Mind you I am sure that with such bad stats recording they will be claiming a poor return - so that's not really an option either.

The last 12 hours has been a really eye opener as to just how bad this IA stats system is.

[GCG]

The last 12 hours has been a really eye opener as to just how bad this IA stats system is.

I found links that were "off" for hours and than worked again, very weird. Even programs with IA back ends serve 404 links.

Besides that programs with IA tracking never outperformed programs that have developed their own tracking software.

I just do not trust programs that outsource affiliate tracking to a 3rd party to "save" costs.

[-Shay-]

We're going to begin the process of moving away from IA programs. Of the five programs that use IA, I'm convinced that only one of them is working as it should.

I personally don't care if it is because the software is messed up or if the people running the programs do not know how to use it properly --- either way is unacceptable.

[Shaun O'neill]

Hi Guys

I wanted to post on this thread, I have been using Income Access for 8 years from the operators side and to be honest I have never used the Inactive/Disabled option for links or banners.

To me the only time you would an operator should ever use that function is for example if a banner is placed on a porn site or on a site that is in a licensed county which would make it illegal for us to advertise and for some bizarre reason the affiliate either refuses to remove it or you can't contact them, other than that it makes no sense.

At iGame affiliates when ever a campaign has ended we simply replace the campaign link with one of the default promos that way the link will always be active and the affiliates players will always be tracked.

I understand that some are blaming IA but to be honest i don't think you can the fault clearly is with the operator, it is like blaming BMW for the drunk driver that had an accident in there car.

After using Income Access for 8 years i still believe the software and tracking is the best in the industry and I would be more than happy to tracking challenge with the IA software.

Thanks

Shaun

[TheGooner]

I understand that some are blaming IA but to be honest i don't think you can the fault clearly is with the operator, it is like blaming BMW for the drunk driver that had an accident in there car.

After using Income Access for 8 years i still believe the software and tracking is the best in the industry and I would be more than happy to tracking challenge with the IA software.

It's rapidly losing it's lustre as "best in industry" if it cannot be relied upon to provide accurate tracking of numbers when operators tweak the settings.

The whole point of an affiliate tracking system is to track reliably. If it cannot be relied upon to do that - if there are options to disable links and tune down tracking - or apply 3rd party suppression software - then all the reports and views of incomplete data are like "putting lipstick on a pig".

[DanHorvat]

Why don't you guys name the operators that are misusing the IA system? Especially you, OP.

[Shaun O'neill]

DanHovart

I would love to see that list i am sure it would make things pretty clear then.

Shaun

Why don't you guys name the operators that are misusing the IA system? Especially you, OP.

[Shaun O'neill]

TheGooner

I understand why you are saying bit in some case the disabled feature could be needed, oddly on 8 years i chosen never to use it so others could follow what we do.

The actual IA tracking is very good i really don't think that can be faulted like i said before you blame BMW for the drunk driver, the operator has to take a blame for dead links, form example the operator decides on the term of the cookie and they decide which cookie wins, the operator also decides if they want negative carry over the options are put in front of them by IA and it almost like a pick a mix.

Shaun

It's rapidly losing it's lustre as "best in industry" if it cannot be relied upon to provide accurate tracking of numbers when operators tweak the settings.

The whole point of an affiliate tracking system is to track reliably. If it cannot be relied upon to do that - if there are options to disable links and tune down tracking - or apply 3rd party suppression software - then all the reports and views of incomplete data are like "putting lipstick on a pig".