So as mentioned I did intend to promote AGLOCO further in the beginning of this year. I have been reading some interesting things though that makes me want to investigate a little further. Now normally for these types of online programs web site operators would normally utilize cookies as a way to keep track of referral information so that the proper people will get credited for the sale or lead. Shopping sites like Amazon.com also utilize cookies to credit the proper people. With AGLOCO, apparently they don’t use cookies for this purpose but instead relies on a dynamically generated session ID that keeps track of where the user came from at that moment.
That sounds great and all, but what I noticed was that if the user decided to not signup right away but instead browse the rest of the site for more information, based on the url it looks like the session is then lost. So, if afterwards the user decides to signup, when they click on the sign up button they are then presented with another signup form that doesn’t appear to have any referral ID’s on the session url at all. Basically, people are worried that they could be losing hundreds of referrals due to this as the user would simply sign up directly to the company. I took a video capture of this in action to make it easier to understand what I am talking about and have also placed a zoomed in url box on the top portion of the video as well as a zoomed in bottom page loading information to make it easier to see how the referral ID seems to disappear. You can see it here:
So of course I am interested in learning more about the details and sent them an e-mail. I haven’t heard a response back yet, but hopefully will soon as it sounds like a topic of interest for a lot. Lot’s of growing pains for a new company if it turns out to be true though. Of course, I don’t rule out the possibility that it could simply be a false alarm as maybe they use some method which actually does keep track of the user despite the example above. Although, if it does turn out to be true it would also explain a lot in terms of how some people who are aggressively promoting it out there don’t seem to be getting the results that they think they should be getting. I’m thinking though that normally when a brand new user goes to the sign up form without going through a link that they have to actually enter the referral ID. With the above example, that field option is actually always gone which most likely implies that maybe the information is stored until the user closes their browser.
Just a few blog posts about AGLOCO and things are already getting interesting. If you signed up through my blog, let me know and we can kind of do our own little test here as well.
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