External feature

Menu: Edit trade / External feature

When you trade traffic, it should be in your best interest to send your trades as much Unique traffic as possible, because it is much more productive than Raw traffic. Higher percent of Unique traffic sent to your trades, will result in higher External productivity.

Although your out.php will NOT send the same visitor to the same trade twice, that alone doesn't guarantee that all traffic you send to your trades will be tracked as Unique. The reason is quite obvious. Part of the traffic you send to your trades, has already visited these trades earlier the same day, but your trade script just didn't know that.

It would be nice, if visitors referred by your trades, could tell your tracking system, which trades they have already visited that day. It would also be nice, if visitors you send to your trades, could tell them which trades they have already visited. The good news is, all this is already possible with the “External feature”.

Visited trades feature can be enabled/disabled for each individual trade. It is recommended to enable it for all trades that are using trade scripts compatible with this feature. You should disable it for all other trades, to prevent passing over “External feature” parameter, which some webmasters might find disturbing, specially because there is no benefit for them.

out.php module passes “External feature” parameter to your trades and your trades pass “External feature” parameter to you.

Example:

Visitor X produced 3 Clk T (trade clicks) on your site. He was sent to the following trades: tradea.com, tradeb.com, tradec.com. When he produced one more Clk T, he was sent to tradex.com. This trade has “External feature” enabled. Return URL for tradex.com is http://www.tradex.com/. Visited trades parameter is added at the end of the Return URL, like this:

http://www.tradex.com/?x=1243.1245.6543

Each 4-digit number represents one visited trade: 1243 (tradea.com), 1245 (tradeb.com), 6543 (tradec.com). Based on this parameter, incoming tracking system on tradex.com can read which trades this visitor has already visited. If any of the visited trades are found in the database, they will be excluded from outgoing list for this visitor.

Navigate to the Overview menu and open Interface manager. Enable External feature paramater in the “Main” section of parameters of the Edit interface window.

In the “External feature” column (Main section) you can see which trades have this feature enabled. You can enable/disable visited trades feature for individual trades directly from this column. Simply click on the respective table cell for Quick edit form to appear. Alternatively, you can enable/disable it from the “Edit trade” window / Advanced accordion.

If you would like to modify “External feature” parameter for multiple trades at the same time, use Mass edit.