Earning recurring rewards at daily click / search sites
We often have merchants who offer a daily reward simply for visiting their site, conducting a search and clicking through to an offer from one of their links. These are usually listed in our Recurring section
The most important point to make about such offers is that they can be very hit-and-miss in terms of rewarding your activity; we make no guarantees as to their reliability and we provide them on best-endeavours basis. We cannot deal with individual queries about these merchants e.g. missing transactions, problems clicking through
Below are some guidelines that might help. They have been put together based on the experiences of our members and there's no guarantee of success. Also, these search /comparison sites will be constantly changing the way they track rewards. With all those provisos, here goes.....
General Guidelines
Firstly, you must always use the imutual link (whilst logged in) when you visit each of these sites.
Make sure that you read the earning notes carefully for each merchant, and take note of any restrictions e.g. maximum number of rewards per day. Note that any such restrictions may be based both on your imutual account and also on the PC / IP address you use, so if someone else visits the same merchant from your computer or network this may limit your ability to earn rewards.
Typically, you will earn rewards when you visit the search / comparison site, search for a product and then click through to a retailer using the link on the price comparison site. This is because the price comparison site normally gets paid by the retailer on a pay-per-click basis.
As you can imagine, sites that award commission on a "pay-per-click" basis have to take strict measures to prevent abuse and fraud. For instance, unscrupulous people might write programs to automatically performs thousands of searches at these sites in order to earn commission. They can get very clever and make such 'robots' appear to be genuine visitors, and the price comparison sites have to stay one step ahead. As a result, genuine visitors will often be mistakenly tagged as 'suspect'; we won't get any commission and hence you won't get your reward.
Naturally, these sites aren't going to tell us exactly how they distinguish suspect visits from genuine ones, as that would just help the fraudsters. As a result of all this, you'll have to accept that earning rewards this way is going to be a hit-and-miss affair. We ask members only to use the sites for genuine searches and to treat any rewards they receive as a bonus.
Some sites will only award commission once "per session"; it has been suggested that you're more likely to receive multiple awards if (after having done one clickthru to a retailer), you close down the open window to the search / comparison site and click thru to it again from imutual. Although "sessions" may also be determined by the time between visits (using a cookie stored on your PC), IP address or other methods.
Reasons a site may treat your visit as 'suspect'
- You keep clicking on the same product link. Only expect to receive rewards if you are clicking on different product links to different retailers
- There are multiple visits from your PC, especially within a short time period. They might use cookies and / or IP addresses to determine this.
- There are multiple visits from the same IP address. With IP addresses, you might find that you are sharing the same address with others on your network e.g. an office, or a popular internet service provider (ISP). This depends on your ISP; if you have your own unique IP address then this will obviously be less of a problem.
- You click through to a retailer's product but then close the window shortly afterwards. It indicates you weren't actually interested in the product as you didn't allow enough time to read the page