adventurenick

@tekgirlymama —?I was having the same issue with the new version of Yoast + Visual Composer, which was making it so the Visual Composer post and page editor couldn’t be used. The solution for most people, should you try updating to the latest version again in the future, seems to be clearing your browser cache.

However, if you’re also using Cloudflare, you’ll likely need to clear the entire cache of your website on there as well. That solved the problem for me.

I also experienced the same thing after updating the plugin. Disabling and re-enabling it fixed the issue.

I’m also having the same problem. On letsbewild.com I am still using 3.8.7 and live traffic is still working fine and on itsjustlight.com I am using 3.8.8 and live traffic is no longer working now that I’ve updated.

I’ll add my vote to add instagram with its 100 million users, as well as tumblr which has 50 million users, and perhaps even flickr which has 87 million users.

I’d agree also – it was perfect where it was before, but if by default you really want it out of the settings menu and more in the open, it should go beneath the settings menu like all of the other plugins that show up in the sidebar do like W3TC, WordFence, etc… SEO is important, but it doesn’t belong at the very top of the admin sidebar.

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.

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)

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.

On my end I was experiencing a ridiculously high increase in clicks on both the site using this plugin and on another low traffic one that wasn’t. Several hundred clicks per day on the very low traffic site and a few thousand clicks a day on the higher traffic site. Totally back to normal now – looks like a weird 4 day glitch.

Reporting back in – my money is on it being a glitch on Amazon’s end, at least for what I’m seeing for the US clicks – since the high click rate is also happening on the site that has never used this plugin.

Looks like maybe some kind of glitch going on for other Amazon Associates:

https://forums.prospero.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=am-associhelp&msg=42533.1&ctx=0

@bu810

could be, I just updated my previous post though because I noticed the same dramatic rise in clicks beginning on the 9th on my other site that isn’t using this plugin and uses a separate tracking ID. So, perhaps it’s entirely coincidental that we happened to start using Amazon Link Localizer around the same time the click numbers started climbing for no reason.

Like you, I’m seeing the biggest number of clicks for Basic Display – Detail Page. There are a few Recommended Product Links banners on the site, but most of the Amazon links are in the text.

I have another site that has a few Amazon Affiliate links on it and a separate tracking ID but isn’t using the Amazon Link Localizer plugin so I looked at the separate reports for both tracking IDs and there was a huge jump in clicks that began on the 9th for both of them, so it looks like Amazon Link Localizer might not have anything to do with this odd rise in clicks.

My small blog that isn’t running this plugin went from about a dozen clicks a day to several hundred clicks a day beginning on the 9th and increasing on the 10th and 11th. Looks like maybe Amazon has just made some kind of internal change in how they calculate clicks – whatever the change is, it’s very weird, since I know my small blog isn’t getting much traffic at all. I will see what happens over the weekend

Very weird indeed, glad I’m not the only one which might make it harder to figure out. The click rate showing up on amazon seems like it might actually correspond with the number of page views. I know there’s no way that a few thousand people all clicked the Amazon links yesterday. It shows about 2400 clicks on the US links yesterday – the pages with the Amazon links did get around that many page loads yesterday, so could the script somehow be making a page load count as a click?

I doubt it’s actually placing an Amazon cookie on all these “clicks” since I didn’t see any corresponding rise in purchases. I guess we’ll see tomorrow for sure.

Any ideas Pete? Hopefully Amazon won’t think this is some effort to game the system

I’m not sure if maybe you are posting to the wrong plugin support forum, but this plugin doesn’t have anything to do with Amazon Web Services.

This plugin changes any Amazon links on your site to use your affiliate ID and uses IP geolocation to change the link depending upon where your visitors are from. So if someone in France visits your site and clicks a link to an Amazon product, instead of going to Amazon.com’s product listing, it will take them to Amazon.fr, using your Amazon affiliate ID for that country.

This plugin should just be plug and play on your site as soon as you enter your affiliate IDs into it for the various countries.