The Nightmare of Duplicates

[ambermagic]

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I also had tracking problems for the first few weeks of launching our programme. We use PayPal to take payments and the standard tracking given to us by our network to work in conjunction with PayPal is not 100% reliable because it relies on the customer to return to our site after payment. Of course they don't always do that.

Because I suspected that this system could cause untracked sales we added our own local tracking so that whenever we have a sale our reports show where the customer came from. Every month I tally this with sales reported on our network and credit affiliates if any sales are missing.

I know that this doesn't help you now and I am sorry to hear what's happened to you, but I think the key for merchants is to have a good understanding of how the tracking works to make sure problems such as untracked/duplicate sales don't occur.

[jd1977]

Jon, Amber

Good progress on AWIN's side this morning, a full list of click times for the duplicate order numbers and have taken the management fee into account. Very impressed with how they have handled this , given we dont know exactly know how or why yet.


The 30 day pending time does allow me to check the orders easier, with the 5 day time on AF you can miss out some duplicates or sales that have gone through. Especially in my trade where you get returns after 14 days, 5 days is too short.

Considering all the duplicates are from 1 affiliate on AF's side I would have expected more of a quicker response time
or more concern shown.

[nim-b]

Every month I tally this with sales reported on our network and credit affiliates if any sales are missing.

Out of interest, how do you know which affiliate an untracked sale came from?

Surely the reports you can run internally will only show you when a sale came from network x, and not exactly which affiliate it came from? Or do you match them with clicks reported by the network?

jd1977: just to back up what someone said earlier, if once you've identified the duplicate sales they have all come from the same affiliate, you need to look into how this affiliate is promoting you. Ok so you should have implemented the internal tracking to prevent duplicates, but if the affiliate knowingly joined your programme on both networks and promoted you through both (possibly by dropping the cookies for both networks or using iframes), you need to find that out.

[ambermagic]

The network also pass the affiliate ID to our site (I had to ask for that to be turned on but it wasn't a problem).

[Hero]

I also had tracking problems for the first few weeks of launching our programme. We use PayPal to take payments and the standard tracking given to us by our network to work in conjunction with PayPal is not 100% reliable because it relies on the customer to return to our site after payment. Of course they don't always do that.

Because I suspected that this system could cause untracked sales we added our own local tracking so that whenever we have a sale our reports show where the customer came from. Every month I tally this with sales reported on our network and credit affiliates if any sales are missing.

it's much easier to arrange for an automatic redirect back to your site's confirmation page (with the tracking code) - you need that either way in order to send the customer the confirmation email

[ambermagic]

It's not as simple as that - the auto redirect is on, but it's not 100% reliable - normally the user sees a page on PayPal that says something like "you are now going to be redirected back to the merchant in 5 seconds, or click here". If they close their browser or go somewhere else altogether then our site won't get hit.

Also, I suspect that if a user doesn't have a paypal account but pays for something, then is offered to create a PayPal account for next time that it leads them through a different screen flow that doesn't end with a redirect-to-merchant. That happened to me when I was testing it although I don't know if that was just a one-off or not. Either way, in my opinion it's flaky.

[Hero]

paypal are a pain to work with in integration, as they do not allow 3rd party tracking on their page, which would solve all the problems you mention. According to some merchants I work with, the percentage of customers who don't get confirmation from both paypal and the merchant is very very small, but it is still a potential risk for untracked sales. And, yes, you are right, if the customer does not log in to an existing account or doesn't create one in the process, they don't get offered the chance to get back to the merchant for some reason.

[Graham@Buyagift]

Being frank, If I can, all the effort I have gone to checking all through the records and matching up times over hours and hours I'm in a frame of mind now that I would just prefer to cancel the contract with one of the providers and just have 1 provider, if it's going to be this much hassle and financial loss it's not really worth it for me.

Since 12am this morning I have counted nearly 100 duplicates in feb-aug, adding onto that the 80 or so I checked yesterday. thats nearly 200 duplicates in 14 months.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is why you're spending hours and hours checking? I'm not sure about Affiliate Future, but on Affiliate Window you can certainly download the pending transactions which shows click time and sale time, and you will also have a primary key of order number.

If you do this for Awin and AF, then you can just do some simple formulae in Excel to give the results you're after - probably take 15 mins in all.

Graham

[jd1977]

You can download a spreadsheet of archived order id's in AWIN but no first click times they have to add those themselves. Affiliate Future as far as I know there is no way of downloading archive records in excel to show order ID and time, although you can download sales per affiliate.

[Graham@Buyagift]

Sorry, I was referring to pending orders. However, just looking at it the archived comission reports do show click time (Awin).

Graham

[jd1977]

Sorry, I was referring to pending orders. However, just looking at it the archived comission reports do show click time (Awin).

Graham

Just checking Awin archives, it shows transaction date/time, and validation date/time?
is that what you mean, it is first click times I had to obtain, time the cookie first hit.

[petro]

Dear all,

I just wanted add to this post and inform you all that the situation is being addressed.

We are very sorry that this issue has occurred, we do acknowledge that in the past we have failed to take enough details on setup about multi-network merchants. We addressed this by the formation of an Integration team early last year, the idea was to ensure all new merchants are given the "optimum" setup, allowing affiliates to easily promote and benefit from the programme.

Our Integration team discuss the following areas with new merchants:

De-duplication at source.
Site Leakage - Phone numbers, Onsite affiliate partnerships.
Datafeed Creation & Quality
Creative Creation & Quality
Incorporation of 3rd party tracking solutions

In addition to this, we now communicate with merchants regularly through a monthly newsletter. Within which we provide information on new technologies, technical tips, marketing advice, affiliate site reviews and any other new developments from within the industry.

I am sure many of you will agree that Affiliate Window is a very different network now, than it was three years ago.

We will be reviewing multi-network programmes this week and contacting any we perceive to be at risk of double counting.

If any merchants would like to discuss their tracking with me feel free to get in touch.

Regards

Peter

[petro]

Unfortunately we only report click times within the interface on the 'Pending commissions' page.

Correction: I have just checked, the click times can be found in the Excel download report on the Archived commission report.

[jd1977]

Thanks for your feedback Peter, sorry just noticed the clickThroughTime field in the spreadsheet at the end. This being the first click time ?

[jd1977]

Completely off this topic, but I have also noticed one of my existing customer codes being used on a Discount Voucher website. As this is only meant for my existing customers I will email them to delete this code.

Wish I had paid more attention to checking for these things! deffinitely learnt my lesson.

To follow up with Affiliate Future I havent heard anything back , so I phoned them and they stated they were too busy at the moment to give me the list of times but would do it tommorow, they recommended I check the times myself on their report system so I will check a few of those, and wait for them to compile a list. They did confirm whoever the lastest cookie time belonged to would be the natural sale.

So we should be able to establish in the next few days if there is a concrete pattern of the last reffer or not.