Programmatic Approach to Evaluate Affiliate Offers

Abstract

To facilitate affiliate publishers with information required to make more thoughtful decisions such as network selection, prior to start promoting an affiliate offer is significant. The present invention proposes a method to identify if an offer is a brokered offer or not and moreover if brokered, to identify how many levels that it is being brokered and who is brokering it. The proposed specification is mainly for the beneficial of the publisher. Publishers of a broker network only see cloaked URLs, rather than the actual URLs that derives from some parent network. Technically, when a user visits a URL of a brokered offer, he/she is being redirected to the offer URL of the immediate parent network. Redirection continues up until it reaches the merchant's website. Each subsidiary network in network chain will deduct an amount from the earnings payable to the publisher. Unless traced as done in the present invention, information about a network chain is not known to the publisher. So, to address the problem, the present invention takes URL to an offer as the only user input, and follows the redirects up until there is no more redirects to follow. These track URLs are then being mapped with their respective network. If the network for a track-URL is unknown, technologies such as WHOIS is being used to find a network with a domain matching the WHOIS record criteria of the track-URL. It is being concluded that, a publisher should either choose the origin or the closest preceding sibling to the origin if they are to make more revenue out of a lead. Only the specification is provided herein, but one skilled in the art is free to make an implementation out of this invention, to help publisher disclose information about an affiliate network chain.