Tracking Affiliate Hit Counts

It is often useful to monitor Distributor/Affiliate-generated traffic as a means to track the overall effectiveness of their campaigns. A Web analytics tool such as WebTrends could provide this for you, as well as other data about prospective customers visiting your Web site. SOLO Server has a basic hit-count tracking mechanism to provide basic data to Distributors/Affiliates without giving them access to all of your Web site analytics.

Collecting Data

To track Distributor/Affiliate hits to your site using SOLO Server and set Affiliate/Distributor cookies in the customer's browser, you can use the info.asp page in the products directory. There are actually two (2) ways in which this page can be used. The first method is to embed a 0x0 pixel image file on the home page of your Web site and set the src property to point to the info.asp page. The second method is to actually redirect to the info.asp page and have the page redirect back to your site after recording the hit. In either case, the URL will be as follows:

• http://secure.softwarekey.com/solo/products/info.asp?a=[Distributor ID/Affiliate ID]&AuthorID=[Your Author ID]&nr=true&page=home"

The query string parameters are as follows:

• a= : The Distributor ID/Affiliate ID sending the traffic to the Web site
• AuthorID= : Your SOLO Server Author ID
• nr= : For use with an embedded pixel image. If this is set to True, the redirect will be suppressed. If this is set to False, a redirect to the page will occur. In this case, the page will redirect to the SOLO Server Author Distributor/Affiliate URL; or, if this is not defined, the SOLO Server Author Web site.
• page= : Use this if you have several places from where you link and you want to differentiate hits from each location. In most instances, this parameter is omitted.

Viewing Traffic

Currently, a raw-hit counter is incremented on the Distributor record when info.asp is called. This counter can be viewed by an administrator or by the affiliate after logging in. A more advanced hit-counting mechanism is currently under development. Please contact support@softwarekey.com to find out when this advanced reporting functionality will be completed and available to the SOLO Server Author community.

Important Information for SOLO Server Self-Hosted Authors: Compact Privacy Policy

Because /products/info.asp places a cookie on the viewer's browser, it is important that the SOLO Server Self-Hosted instance have a compact privacy policy loaded. Otherwise, when the referring page is loaded, a privacy report will show up in the browser status bar, indicating that the third-party cookie was blocked. SOLO Server Shared and Dedicated URL already have a compact privacy policy on the servers.