High Clicks

Can you post/email me the link and let me know which product/links are showing up in the reports and I’ll have a look.

Hey Pete, was about to shoot you an email and then I think I might have figured out what the issue was. Most of the affiliate links on my site are amazon shortlinks, like amzn.to/7hujy8

The plugin is supposed to strip the publisher ID when it does its lookup, but I’m thinking that because the links are all using the shortlink format that it can’t strip the publisher ID and rewrite the URL without triggering this false click.

I went through and changed all the links, so we’ll see if that sorted it out.

Thanks for the update Nick, let me know what you find. The script does actually try and strip out the affiliate ID from a shortlink check, but to do this it has to retrieve the full URL, which it does my doing get_headers() on the shorturl. As far as I know, get_headers doesn’t register as a click (it doesn’t download any of the HTML content) but perhaps I’m wrong on that – might be something to test out.

Hey Pete, should know for sure tomorrow morning when the click report for today shows up. I’ll let you know if that was actually the issue. (fingers crossed)

Looks like my guess was right, after changing all the shortlinks to regular links, it’s back to normal.

So the moral of the story seems to be, don’t use the shortlinks unless you really need to.