I regularly get email and PM’s from people asking questions about coding. Obviously I don’t have time to answer all of these questions, but luckily it’s easy to choose which ones I WILL answer.

Sadly, most of the time the question is either too vague, lacking in detail, convoluted, or just so poorly written that it shows they didn’t bother to do any problem solving or learning on their own. Those are the ones I ignore.

Yesterday, I got this question about passing subids to a rotation script. The guy’s question is lucid and has enough detail so I don’t have to send a reply, but not so detailed that it’s a mess to read. So here it is:

Hey!

I’ve found a bunch of useful stuff on your site and figured you could help solve my issue with p202 lp rotator script. I’ve check out http://ctrtard.com/affiliate-marketing/passing-variables-through-prosper-202-mo/ but that’s a bit different

I send my traffic to a .php script which then randomly rotates different landing pages, the script is:

<?php
$k = $_GET['sub'];

$aff[] = 'http://www.mydomain.com?t202id=****&c1=a&c2=b&c3=c&c4=d&t202kw=';
$aff[] = 'http://www.mydomain.com?t202id=****&c1=a&c2=b&c3=c&c4=d&t202kw=';

srand ((double) microtime() * 1000000);
$random_number = rand(0,count($aff)-1);

$lol = ($aff[$random_number]);
$lal = $lol.$k;

header("Location: $lal");
?>

*found this script on AdHustler*

I want to pass the c1,c2,c3,c4 variables through the script. So far I can only pass through the subid(more like a keyword in this case) by adding ?sub={text} at the end of the .php script. So if my final link I post looks like http://www.mydomain.com/redir/1.php?sub={text} the {text} would get appended to my actual tracking url’s at the end like so: http://www.mydomain.com?t202id=****&c1=a&c2=b&c3=c&c4=d&t202kw={text}

What’s the best way to approach this script if I want to pass through and append the c1,c2,c3,4 variables to my tracking links? I’m pretty sure it should be quite easy it’s just that i’m my knowledge of php is non-existant lol

Should I contact Wes instead?

Any guidance is greatly appreciated!

Analysis

Notice how he first played to my ego by telling me how useful my blog is? He even used a relevant link to my blog in the first paragraph! That’s how you do it people! And that last line about contacting Wes was just icing on the cake! But seriously, here’s the solution…

Solution

<?php
    $sub = $_GET['sub'];
    $c1 = $_GET['c1'];
    $c2 = $_GET['c2']; 
    $c3 = $_GET['c3']; 
    $c4 = $_GET['c4']; 

    $aff[] = "http://www.mydomain.com?t202id=1234&c1=$c1&c2=$c2&c3=$c3&c4=$c4&t202kw=$sub";
    $aff[] = "http://www.mydomain.com?t202id=1234&c1=$c1&c2=$c2&c3=$c3&c4=$c4&t202kw=$sub"; 
      
    $random_number = rand(0,count($aff)-1);
    $url = $aff[$random_number];

    header("Location: $url");
?>

Notes

Careful readers will see I removed the srand function. You haven’t needed to seed the random number generator since early versions of PHP 4, and no one is running that anymore. I simplified a couple of other things as well.

The take-away from this is understanding how you get variables from the URL and used them in your script. This is done with assigning the $_GET global variable to a variable in your script. You can see, the first 5 lines are doing this.

Take a look at line 2. It says: $sub = $_GET[‘sub’]
The $_GET[‘sub’] part tells PHP to grab the value of “sub” as it appears in the URL in your browser’s address bar.

For example: http://google.com?sub=apples.

In this case, when we do $sub = $_GET[‘sub’], $sub would equal “apples”.

To make it even more clear, you could do this:

$fruit = $_GET[‘sub’];

Then $fruit would equal “apples”.

Once you have the value in the local variable, you can do whatever you want with it. Like use it in a redirect like we did here.

This stuff is basic, sure, but it’s something quite a few affiliates are a bit hazy on. And it’s something that you can use to pass data along to forms, scripts, landing pages, and more. So it’s good to know.

Questions?

Tags: php, Prosper202, Tracking, Tracking202