For me, profiles would be useful to track how a particular landing page performs. But it would be virtually impossible for me to use profiles to track thousands of different referral pages. I could create groups of pages, I suppose, but that still doesn’t give me as much detail as I’d like.
What Playtech and Income Access offer is nice, and a large group of affiliates might find it useful up to a point. But if you have a network of database-driven websites, you won’t find it that useful for tracking every single page.
A few weeks ago I designed my own way to track the outbound clicks, and it seems to be working nicely. kwblue, you are right — it is surprising to see where some of the clicks come from. The information is fascinating and priceless.
Profiles are useful, and I do think Randy’s suggestion will help a lot of affiliates. However, I would like to see more affiliate programs collecting and displaying the referral URLs. As I said, this information is priceless. 