Referrer

[Jan]

I want to set up a URL that will tell me where it came from, the idea being that I can set up several of these and then see where they came from. I want to be able to access this information from within Actinic so that I can only run a certain script (for Twenga in this case) if the sale came from a click through from there.

Is this possible?

Regards,

[Duncan Rounding]

You could use something like this:
http://www.myshop.co.uk/acatalog/mys...ferrer=Twenga1
the ?referrer=Twenga1 bit shouldn't affect the page yet should be sufficient to be able to trigger a script.

That said you might not need any special URL - see this: http://www.codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=214902

[leehack]

What's the format of the URL Jan, working on just this at the moment with an affiliate scheme, where we identify the affiliate from the URL (i've had ID appended onto the URL) and serve up branded logos on the site for each affiliate.

About to test it in an hour.

[fergusw]

Jan,
Another way would be to capture the referring URL into a cookie on the site and then in a field in the checkout (hidden or otherwise) you could have some javascript populate this field with the cookie value (and then clear it).
This would give you the referring URL in a field that comes down with the order.

Something similar has been mentioned in the past on here regarding capturing the IP address of the customer in the checkout. This is simply an extension of that.

[Jan]

Hi Chaps,

That is a very clever idea Lee and I think that in a way what I want to do is more or less the same, the difference being that I want to run a script instead of displaying an image.

Ideally, the URL format would be something along the lines of Duncan's suggestion.

http://www.myshop.co.uk/acatalog/pag...ferrer=Twenga1

the click through would come into an Actinic section page and I would want to use the details in the final checkout page.

I know I'm being thick here but I've never had to do anything along these lines before and have no idea what I'm doing. I have looked at the AUG and searched around the web but haven't found anything made any sense to me.

If I'm asking too much, just tell me and I'll go off to referrerschool101.

Cheers,

[Duncan Rounding]

This should be enough to trigger a script:

window.onload = function() {
   if(document.referrer.indexOf('YourSpecificURLpart') != -1) {
      // your code goes here
   }
}

[leehack]

I've sent you an email with some details of what it does Jan.

[Jan]

Thank you Lee, I'll wait for the results of your testing, lots of people have asked for that sort of branding in the past, not necessarily for affiliates but for different countries / sub companies etc, I think you could have a little product there if you do get it working well.

Duncan : For now I have just added an alert to the window.onload function showing the value of document.referrer and even when I add ?referrer=Twenga to the end of my URL my popup is always blank (I used alert(document.referrer)).

I've tried it with and without quotes on the twenga part.

Cheers,

[Jan]

Ah ha - you only get a referrer if you arrive from clicking on a link, if I just type it into the menu bar, the referrer detail is ignored.

I'm getting somewhere now.

Cheers,

[Duncan Rounding]

I think it will only work online - I don't think the referrer will have a value when testing locally.

[fergusw]

Jan,
I'd go down the route of 2 javascript functions.

The first, on all pages, checks to see if the referrer is off-site i.e. not an internal link, and then uses Actinic's own setCookie function to set a referrer cookie

e.g.
[psuedo code]

function myReferrer()
{
if (document.referrer.indexOf('myURL') = -1) {
     setCookie("extReferrer",document.referrer);
   }
}

and then once the value is stored in the cookie it can be called to fill your checkout field when relevant page loads
[psuedo code]

function myReferrerRetrieve()
{
   var myReferrer = getCookie("extReferrer");
  // some processing to extract relevant code/text etc from URL
   document.getElementbyID("checkoutFieldID").value = myReferrer;
}

very rough and ready but it should point the way to a possible solution?

[Jan]

Fergus : thanks for that, that is the conclusion that I came to for a solution but had no idea at all how to do it. I think I could have implemented that.

My problems are solved though because Twenga does it all for me automatically, I just have to run a script on the last checkout page and it will work out if it needs to send an order through (which it will do if the customer clicked through a twenga link in the last 30 days).

I might add an option to use either the referrer perl script or a plain link with twenga (because the referrer perl script doesn't work in all circumstances) so that it will be easy for people to double check that an order that people are paying commission on really did come from twenga.

Happy Day eh.

Thanks so much for all of the help today, I really appreciated it.

I'm very impressed so far with Twenga so far, a lot of the search results I'm getting these days include twenga links and they have been very helpful. I think that they also have some great introductory offers in the pipeline for Actinic customers. You have to be willing to pay the commission though, it's completely free to setup but you then pay a commission on every sale. The commission is based on the product type and some of them (presumably the ones with a high margin that other tools may not accept, guns for example) are quite high.

Regards,

[fergusw]

Very interesting Jan. Thanks for sharing!