The Nightmare of Duplicates

[jd1977]

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Normally I log into Affiliate Window and Affiliate Future seperately, but yesterday I had the both windows open at once on the same screen, so I could see both lists.

While checking my commissions to validate yesterday, I noticed the same Order ID appear in both Affiliate Future and Affiliate Window. The thought had struck me "oh well this is a random occurance, customer has probably gone to PPC ad and a Voucher site for example" So I emailed both providers to gain information and click appends or code that would tag this and stop it from happening again.

Job done I thought, random duplicate must be the only one, my web developer will impliment the code so it wont happen again.

In a conversation with Affiliate Future they mentioned "have you located anymore duplicates?" not at that point in time but I did plan to sit down and go through all the hundreds of records to spot any.

After time of searching and checking in the small hours last night I found more
all from the same Affiliate Future affiliate, and random affiliates within Affiliate Window, 10, 20, 60, 80,more and more 100's of duplicates and this is just going back to only September 2007. There was a cold sense of panic when I realised I had paid out 10% commission on 1 sale, and 7% commission on the same sale again, sure I can cancel the current ones that are duplicate and solve it, but going back over hundreds if not thousands of records there could be a loss of £££££'s to my company.

What I have done today is discuss with both Affiliate Future and Affiliate
Window the last cookie time, as an industry standard I have been told it is the
last cookie to drop that attributes the sale.

The difficulty comes when confirming this information between 2 Affiliate
Companies Affiliate Future need the click time from Affiliate Window to confirm who is
the real holder of the sale , and Affiliate Window will not release this information to them because of copyright.

If I take down both sets of information and verify it myself then how do I give the evidence to either provider to prove all my duplicates? I did think about sending it to some form of Affiliate Consultant to verify as a third part that way there could be no arguement over who the last cookie and thus sale belongs to.

At this moment in time I have only checked back to Sept 07 and there are nearly 100 duplicates, all from 1 affiliate in Affiliate Future and random Affiliates in Affiliate Window. If I do gather all the information I need is there any way of claiming this back or attributing who the sale belongs to. I understand the point about click append code (which I had never come across before)

The point is if I have 500 or so duplicates over 2-3 years then I will have paid out nearly double what I should have. I'm sure if any retail customer has been charged twice by a shop they be able to claim back the money on their credit card by law.

Has this happened to any other merchant , I know there are hundreds of records we all have to check, but bit stunned to be honest
will teach me to check records more carefully.

[Hero]

The problem occurs because you are displaying both tracking codes on all your sales confirmation pages. The solution is dead simple: you apply local tracking from your end to define which NETWORK was the last referrer. You then only display that network's tracking code only, so the order is tracked only once. You don't get the 2 networks to work together, you do that your end.

It's our job as networks to instruct our merchants on multiple networks on the importance of local tracking - if the merchant doesn't want to implement it, that's their prerogative, but at least they know the risk.

A lot of things can go wrong with local tracking, so it's important that it's thoroughly tested from your networks and that you don't make any changes to your site without notifying them.
Clarke Duncan from PoR has done a fantastic blog post on local tracking, how to implement it and potential problems: Local Cookies Explained – Affiliate Marketing Blog

However, local tracking cannot be applied in retrospective by clawing back affiliate commissions. You will severely annoy your affiliates who will be penalised for something they have no control over (despite your suspicions). It's your "fault" for not having noticed before and those advisors of yours for not bringing this up as a potential problem.

[jd1977]

I Agree with what you are saying re- the coding. But surely I should have been made aware of this when I signed up, or a newsletter, email, phone call from the Affiliate Company to warn you.

If I had said to a customer "sorry you have been charged multiple times but you're not having your money back because did not notice sooner" I would issued with a bank chargeback as quick as.

[Hero]

surely I should have been made aware of this when I signed up, or a newsletter, email, phone call from the Affiliate Company to warn you.

I will turn the question round - did you notify the first network that you were launching on a second one and did you tell the second one you already have an existing program, for them to give you that info?

[jd1977]

Yes both networks were aware as they both had to contribute the code for the developers to place it on the check success page, when the site was developed, so telephone calls back and forth it getting it to work on the php mentioned this , both parties knew.

We even had to change some of the code as it was conflicting on the same page, I did initially think it was the new website as this was launched last september, but since discovering duplicates before that date this would not be the case as they have appeared on both old and new website.

The affiliate is also on both networks

The principal to this is how far back or how much to I write off to "whoopsy a technical error" I dont mind paying out double for 1 or 2 random mistakes fair enough, but how much is enough.. £100 in overpayment, £500, £1000... more

From september 07 it currently stands at around £500 in duplicate orders/ payments if it goes back far enough and can be proven with difference in cookie times and gets into the thousands I wont think twice about terminating my account with whichever company the duplicates have come from mistake or not.

I simply cannot just sit back and say "oh well 2 or 3 grand down the drain my fault for not being techinical minded enough to notice" to be honest the time I have already spent on this checking records, emailing , telephoning has cost me in time anyway.

To be fair both companies have been willing and helpful in communication and I would like to see a sensible outcome to this , Affiliate Future have offered to check through all the duplicate orders and deal with the issue once I can get all the duplicates orders and times to them (which I cant due to copyright reasons)

[Hero]

I can't really give you further advice from my end, as I will be treading on awin & AF's toes here and I'll end up annoying them, which is not my intention. It is indeed strange that you say that the duplications have mainly come from one particular affiliate, makes you wonder why, and that will need to be investigated from you and your networks. If indeed malpractice is spotted, I'm sure clawbacks will be discussed and, rest assured, the networks will be investigating on a larger scale than just your program.
Terminating your contract with either of the networks won't solve your problem of restrospective commissions. Punishing your networks is one reaction, but not necessarily the most recommended one. You just need to remain calm and keep your head cool, no matter how much your finance director might be screaming down your ear

[jd1977]

Well i'm just going back through Aug - Jan 07 now, and August has around 10 duplicates, it's not going to be in mulitple thousands but if this has occured over 2-3 years you're probably looking at £1200 at most in overpayment.

The 1 affiliate is a main PPC affiliate of mine, so the PPC might explain why they are all from that 1 person. Due to the higher frequency of spend on their part I guess, I do take into account this has happened on 2 networks , so each will not be aware of the others duplicates only their own.

Calmness has played a huge part so far, all credit to AF they checked 1 Order ID for me, which was the most recent duplicate and said the cookie had occured later on AW and the sale belonged to AW. So they were willing to cancel the current dupe on that basis.

Not sure if they will be so understanding with 200-300 duplicates though

[jd1977]

If the click append code is very important in this case, then why is it not part of the actual affiliate code used for tracking? hmmm. And I wonder how many merchants know about the extra code.

[tbp]

If the click append code is very important in this case, then why is it not part of the actual affiliate code used for tracking?

The reason is because it's entirely down to you and your site how you implement this. The click append is for YOUR site, not for the network, so forcing it to be added won't do any good as it doesn't mean merchants are going to update their sites to use it, and many are only on one network and so wouldn't need it anyway.

As Hero pointed out, what you should be doing is checking which network the visitor came from, putting it in a session variable or cookie at the point of entry, and then only showing the relevant tracking code on your sale confirmed page.

Unfortunately, this is down to you to do, and I think it's unlikely you would get a refund from the networks on the basis that you were unaware of this. I do believe it's mentioned in the networks documentation.

Saying that though, it is a bit strange that you have a large number of duplicates, and this is something that definately needs looking in to. You would expect some people to come though a link to your site from both networks, but not that many. It sounds like a rogue affiliate has been cooking stuffing, ie dropping a cookie for each network when someone goes to their site, through an iframe or similar so the visitor doesn't even have to click on a link. If this is the case, it should be detectable. However, I'm not sure where you stand on getting a refund, it's likely that the affiliate would have all pending commissions declined and be dropped from the programme, but i`m not sure whether paid commissions can be clawed back.

It's likely going to be one of those live and learn situations unfortunately. You need to get your developers straight on to modifying the code to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

[Bud]

jd1977

From the other side of the fence, as it were, I'd like to offer my support as you seem to have a genuine problem on your hands. I've PM'ed you, and if I'm one of your duplicates I'll refund.

We (affiliates) go on about trust and accountability - it works both ways....

Oh ... tbp - I'm not suggesting I iframe or cookie stuff (I wouldn't know how!!), just understand what jd must be going through and know it would bug the hell out of me!

[tbp]

Oh ... tbp - I'm not suggesting I iframe or cookie stuff (I wouldn't know how!!),

I know you weren't suggesting that, don't worry

It is a very unfortunate situation, and I am sympathetic, but I`ve tried to give what I see are the facts, rather than saying don't worry it will all turn out fine when theres a possibility it probably won't. At least now the problem is known about it can be dealt with stopping any further loses.

[jd1977]

jd1977

if I'm one of your duplicates I'll refund.
!

Well that's a good point really, as it's not a case of duplicate affiliates causing lots of duplicate sales, it is 1 affiliate with hundreds of duplicate order numbers relating to duplicate order numbers in another provider.

So it will be very unlikely that the random affiliates will get cancelled sales, based on the first order ID tested it will be the affiliate with all the duplicates appearing that will get cancelled sales.

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.

And some of these are not 50 pence here and there, they are £8 or so each, 1 sale had a total of £17 paid out in commission on it via both providers. If I lost £17 a go at 200 times you can kind of see where I am coming from with this.

I'm hoping to remain calm with the Affiliate Providers, but I fear a couple more days of "coding mumbo jumbo" talk I will snap.

[JonLloyd]

As a merchant who runs with two networks we do have the local tracking in place. Someone should be made accountable for your situation and in reality I think both you and the two networks should take equal responsibility. The networks should have flagged this as a problem and you should have checked your stats earlier. IMO the affiliates should not lose out at all as they could have been running ppc campaigns based on the results they were seeing.

[jd1977]

Hi Jon

I take responsibility for not spotting it sooner, but the technical side I really was not aware that such a thing could happen as the web company I use impliment all the coding.

Having said that I could have spotted it in 6, or 12 months time and said "I wish I spotted it sooner" the main thing is that it has been spotted now.

Affiliate Window have offered to waiver the management fees for the year and are directly talking to the web team to check the click append works.

Havent heard anything from Affiliate Future as yet

[JonLloyd]

Glad you are making progress. I do feel for you in this situation. I guess the only good thing is that the money has been paid - i.e you are not having to find that money now and yes it's going to be fixed so no more double paying. Hope affiliate future take some of the responsibility. Good to see the leader AWIN stepping up to make amends.