how do affiliate companies track sales

[Emma AdSelect]

Obviously I can't speak for all networks, as I've not even worked here very long so I'm not 100% familiar with it all.

One way (the way we use) is to request merchants to place a pixel on their page, where the conversion is made, and it is this which is tracked, in order to determine whether a conversion has taken place.

Should the merchant accidentally forget to place the pixel when re-modelling/altering pages, we work out the average conversion rates based on previous data on the clicks/conversions ratio and ask the merchant to pay for that - as it is likely that actual conversions will be around this amount. This is however a rare occurence, and most of the time it all goes to plan.

I hope that makes sense, and is of help

[BenKowaBunga]

That pixel is used in conjunction either with a cookie or by passing the affiliate details through via the url. Once the pixel is loaded on the receipt page - then you know a sale has been made. The cookie or url string is used to confirm which affiliate actually referred that sale.

There will always be leakage - people can delete/refuse cookies, amend url strings, people using more than one computer, down time, scumware screwing with stuff, etc. Nothing's 100% guaranteed online, but it ain't in life either

[pricethat]

ok, much of its been said above in other posts, but here goes:

(Scenario 1), when the user clicks on a tradedoubler link (ie one on your page with your affiliate id) then it usually cookies the site user before it redirects them to your web site. As all web sites have a sale confirmation page (ie a page that is never seen unless a sale is completed) then it is fair to say that at this point you the site owner have made a sale. As you are aware most affiliate schemes ask you to place a snippet of html code in that page that calls up the 1 pixel image. The affiliate service scripts match the image requests against cookies users and voila, they record the sale.

There is however a potentiol to get ripped off using this scheme, not that i suggest any of them will do this to you but as i am a coder myself i always make sure my clients know the following, if your site visitor is cookied and visits your site and decides not to buy for whatever reason then they have a cookie on their machine that will trigger a payment if that same user decides to come back to your site to buy, now that i think is fair, however, part of marketing is that you market across many mediums, the more your site is promoted the more people get to trust your name. Imagine now that the user now clicks on one of your pay per click listings in kelkoo or something and then goes to your site again, but this time buys, maybe in a month or a week from originally visiting your site, not only do you have to pay the affiliate fee as the cookie is still there, but you also have to pay for the other traffic that brought them there as well.

Now look at this in depth a bit more. In my main industry of mobile phone accessories, it does not matter what you do, its always the same names that are in the results of your search directmobileaccessories, l8shop etc etc, partly because of all you affiliates out there promoting whoever pays you etc etc, but for the site user all he ever see's is the same old links to the same old people until he or she reaches such a disatisfaction at the results that he or she is forced to buy from the sites that they have already visitited.

Now imagine that the user has in fact visited your site many times from a huge variety of sources. sometimes from publishers with pay per click results, sometimes from different affiliate schemes, they all cookied the same user over a period of time and eventually they bought, that customer now cost you a fortune because each of the affiliate schemes in theory could want to charge you a commission because one of their site users that has a cookie on their machine has made a sale and called up the image.

I myself had a customer charged twice for a sale made on his site where the visitor had visited links from two different affiliate schemes. So its only theoretical but if you do this marketing what i advise is that you make some clever code that only shows this html on the confirmation page if the entry page = that of the affiliate id. In other words give the affiliate company a url that has an identifier code at the end of the url ie ?adref=10 and then make some dynamic code that says, only show html if entry referrer url = whatever. The reason for this is that then, even if the site user book marks your site for later, if the entry page is no longer the affiliate id when they come back you will not have to pay the commission because it was not conducted on that session.

That technically is a bit bad and many affiliate schemes might boot you off for that, but a good affiliate scheme would be able to talk you through the issues that i have just highlighted above and will tell you what they have done or can do to combat this.A