When you use an aMember affiliate link to make sales - google analytics ecommerce tracks all those sales as DIRECT traffic instead of the correct referrer (your affiliate site) - it seems that when you send traffic as an aMember affiliate link, your HTTP referrer goes nil. Is there any way to fix this?
I'm pretty sure this has something to do with the redirection in go.php - I think google analytics just needs to be properly implemented into the affiliate side of things...
Upon further reading it seems this may have something to do with using secure https and subdomains for your checkout... any help would be greatly appreciated
Just received a bullshit response from support: Hello, when user clicks on affiliate link browser goes to go.php and then redirects to other page. GA code you have on signup or thankyou page just can not get first referrer becuase previous page is go.php or other amemebr page. --- I need a real solution to this problem, not a dumb excuse
The problem is not an aMember. go.php script use 302 HTTP redirect and most browsers send previous referer when when redirected in such way. I just tested this myself on local installation here is log of requests: Affiliate link was put to http://192.168.1.4/test.php Then I clicket it and was redirected to signup.php Code: http://192.168.1.4/test.php GET /test.php HTTP/1.1 Host: 192.168.1.4 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100915 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.10 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 115 Proxy-Connection: keep-alive HTTP/1.0 200 OK Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 09:26:08 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu) X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.2-1ubuntu4.5 Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 82 Content-Type: text/html X-Cache: MISS from dev X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from dev:3128 Via: 1.1 dev:3128 (squid/2.7.STABLE7) Connection: keep-alive Proxy-Connection: keep-alive ---------------------------------------------------------- http://localhost/PRO-3_0/go.php?r=1&i=l0 GET /PRO-3_0/go.php?r=1&i=l0 HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100915 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.10 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 115 Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://192.168.1.4/test.php HTTP/1.1 302 Found Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 09:26:14 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu) X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.2-1ubuntu4.5 Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma: no-cache Set-Cookie: amember_aff_id=1; expires=Fri, 14-Oct-2011 09:26:15 GMT; path=/ Location: http://localhost/PRO-3_0/signup.php Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 20 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 ---------------------------------------------------------- http://localhost/PRO-3_0/signup.php GET /PRO-3_0/signup.php HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100915 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.10 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 115 Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://192.168.1.4/test.php HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 09:26:15 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu) X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.2-1ubuntu4.5 Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma: no-cache Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Length: 2394 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=99 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 As you can see referer was sent in signup.php request after 302 redirect: GET /PRO-3_0/signup.php HTTP/1.1 Referer: http://192.168.1.4/test.php How did you insert google analytics code? If you include separate js file from signup template, this will lead to another http request when that js script will be loaded by browser and referer will be different in that request.
In fact, it is easy to fix. Edit file amember/go.php replace last line PHP: header("Location: $link"); to PHP: html_redirect($link); then edit amember/templates/redirect.html and include GA code into.
Thanks for the responses, going to try it out now Sorry for the bit of attitude - it's always frustrating getting a generic/excuse response the first time around
This worked for getting affiliate clicks to appear as proper referrers to get to the main page (after go.php) but I think the code in google_analytics.js needs to be re-written to support sub-domains (or multiple top-level domains) to get ecommerce working properly because sales are going through a subdomain (eg. secure.paysite.com)