… until I put my tracking URL in the iframe src="" attribute.

The page went completely blank, which wasn’t supposed to happen.

Finding the culprit

I use Firefox as my main Web browser, so I checked the page in Internet Explorer, Chrome and Opera… and everything was fine.

Anyway — in case you haven’t guessed from this post’s title — the culprit was the Firefox Adblock Plus add-on.

As soon as I disabled Adblock Plus, the iframed page showed up again.

So clearly Adblock Plus doesn’t like some affiliate links.

What links are affected

I’ve only tested a few different affiliate links so far, but Adblock Plus doesn’t like:

Optimise My Site tracking URLs (which is what I was using).

Clickbank affiliate links.

But the good news is, Prosper202 tracking URLs are not affected.

Are you losing money?

According to the Adblock Plus add-on page, it’s been downloaded more than 87 million times… and is downloaded approximately 858,000 times a week.

Which means you could be sending a boatload of prospective customers to a blank page.

And the more tech savvy your customer, more likely they are to be using Firefox and Adblock Plus.

How to get around the problem

One way is to use a PHP redirect, and then use the cloaked URL in the iframe src="" attribute.

If you don’t know how to set up a PHP redirect, then check out Rosalind Gardner’s post How to Cloak Your Affiliate Links the Easy Way.

Just don’t use obvious advertising words like "track" or "ads" in your file, folder, or link names and you should be OK.

Yet NetMarketShare still puts IE6′s market share at more than 17% for June 2010.

So I think it’s way too early to stop making your sites and landing pages compatible with IE6. After all, that’s roughly one in six visitors who are still using the dinosaur browser.

Testing options

Services like Browsercam and Browsershots are really useful. You can see how your site looks in dozens of browsers on all the major operating systems…

… but you have to wait up to 30 minutes between screencaptures.

So if you want to check your CSS tweaks in real-time, you’re going to need to install IE6 on your computer.

Which is what I did previously.

I used Multiple IEs to install every version of Internet Explorer.

But yesterday I discovered a brilliant free tool called IETester.

It uses the rendering engines of every version of Internet Explorer from IE5.5 to IE9 Preview (IE9 Preview requires Vista SP2 or Windows 7).

And you can use tabs to see how your site looks in different versions of IE all on one screen.

Which means you can quickly fix those annoying IE quirks.

Other uses

You could also use it to check your advertisers’ landing pages.

If you’re using paid traffic and paying for every click, then you really don’t want to be sending every 6th visitor to a page that’s completely bolloxed up, right?

Changing the size, colour, text, or position can have a big effect on your click-through rates.

I’ve tested dozens of different buttons, but after reading The ULTIMATE Submit Button REVEALED! Putting all the Pieces Together… by Eric Graham (a.k.a. the Conversion Doctor), I realised there was something I hadn’t tested…

… adding a border around the button that changes when you hover your mouse over it.

So I added some new CSS rules to my highest CTR button.

And here it is:

If you hover your mouse over it you’ll notice your cursor changes from the arrow to the hand (primary feedback).

The red border changes to green (secondary feedback).

It also uses the “title” attribute of the <a> tag to display a tooltip call to action (more secondary feedback)

My split testing results

Compared to the button without the interactive border, it increased CTR by 14%.

Not bad for five minutes work, right?

Of course, lots of factors affect your CTR, so you may not get the same results as me.

Grab the code

If you want to try this button yourself, here’s the code:

If you need to change the button text, just visit Da Button Factory and make your own button. It’s where I made the above button (sans the arrow icon).