Affiliate code fixes for Ebay, Adsense, Clickbank Hopfeed Ads, and CJ/GoDaddy

Posted

March 14, 2009

Lately, I have been involved in several projects that will come to life in the months to come.

My most recent project needed some extra monetization options, so I explored Ebay, AdSense, Clickbank, and Commission Junction/GoDaddy Bulk Domains.

I thought I would share some tips on solving some problems that came up with each of them:

Ebay

The EBay affiliate program (remember you must be approved) offers some tools to create ads. While they are a little bit lacking in features, they do work. One problem I had was that the ad titles were mixed capitals, and a font I didn’t like making them hard to read.

My Solution: To fix this I added a entry in my style sheet.
.ebayText a { text-transform: lowercase; font-size:11px; font-family: sans-serif; text-decoration:none;}
This made sure that the titles were all lowercase. It also changed the font size and font family and removed the underline that usually appears on line. I also added a .ebayText a:hover { text-decoration:underline; } to add back the underline on hover.

AdSense

The problem I had here was that I had only a clump of valid text on the page that was useful content. To make sure that my adsense was relative to that content, I found an optional TAG set that told google to use just the text inside these tags as the content for determining the adsense ads.

My Solution:
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
content you want google to focus on goes here
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

Now I still need to tweak and play with this to see what is optimal, but perhaps you have a situation where these tags may come in handy.

Clickbank

Clickbank has rolled out its hopfeed ads system. I chose to use the hopfeeds text ads because the space I had wouldn’t work for the other option of the tabbed box. At first everything went smoothly.

Then I could see that they were making changes to their code, because my display changed. I quickly fixed this and then they made another change that broke it altogether in IE6.

Now I know I may get all kinds of flack for using IE6. As a developer, I get it all day anyway. But I use almost all browsers when working on the web (IE6, IE7, FF1.5, 2.0, 3.0, Chrome on Windows [XP and Vista] and Safari on OSX.

But stats show that almost 20% of browser use is still IE6, so this is important to make work if you can.

My Solution: As it turns out, the problem was a change in the IFRAME code of the Clickbank hopfeeds ad system. They added a style that included an overflow attribute. It turns out that IE6 does not support overflow in an IFRAME and thus the iframe ends up broken and blank. To make it worse, the IFRAME does not have an ID or class that allows me to access it and DROP the overflow attribute.

The solution I came up with is wrapping a span/div with an ID in it around the javascript call to Clickbank and then setting the overflow property of the child IFRAME to blank.

  … above here is your hopfeeds var list …
  <span id=”cbads”>
  <script src=’http://www.hopfeed.com/script/hopfeed.js’></script>
  </span>

Then, using Prototype as a javascript framework, the add this:
<script>
var cb = $(’cbads’).childElements();
cb[1].setStyle(’overflow: ‘);
</script>

For non prototype javascript, add this:
<script>
var cb = document.getElementById(’cbads’);
cb.childNodes[1].style.overflow = ”;
</script>

The non-iframe (javascript) version has a problem as well in that it writes a style sheet that changes the rest of your page due to some generic class naming. But I didn’t use that, so I will leave it to someone else to fix. I did report both problems to Clickbank. Maybe they will fix them.

CommissionJuntion/GoDaddy Bulk Domains

Lastly, I had a problem with CommissionJunction (cj.com) and GoDaddy bulk Domains. It turns out that the CJ code that is generated to work with GoDaddy Bulk Domains doesn’t work. Apparently, nobody ever noticed.
But What happens is that upon filling out a form with domains, it submits to one of CJ’s affiliate domains and then redirects to GoDaddy’s bulk domain page. But the domain box is blank since it is redirected with a GET instead of a POST. Thus the box on GoDaddy’s site does not contain the domains passed to it.

After a matter of weeks of gently asking for help, they have realized that there is indeed a problem and GoDaddy has stepped up and claimed responsibility for the error and is correcting it. I was told it would be ready by the end of last week, but as of yet, still no go.

So there you have it. The small trials of deploying a product to market and working out problems with 3rd party code.

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