Fed up with failed tracking...

[aotagain]

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Its obviously well known that a percentage of sales don't track for whatever reason.

However, I think the scary thing is when you buy straight through your own link on a spyware free PC and the sale doesn't show up.

Also it would be interesting to know how the untracked sales level is measured in these general quotes of %. If its like customer complaints we're in trouble! ie. 1 customer complains, but there's another 3 that don't. Is the untracking only discovered by investigation in cases of doubt and therefore there could be a load more under the surface ?

Someone made an interesting point further up about the scale of operation that would be bothered by untracked sales. I guess if a network or an affiliate is pretty profitable and has a wide range of merchant sales coming through, then they wouldn't naturally be that worried about lost commissions.

On the other hand, any specialist affiliates, even largish ones could be quite badly affected by a couple of big merchants wih intermittent tracking problems. Especially if your site promotes a small selection of high ticket items. eg. top end luxury holidays.

[Cheapdvds]

i posted before regarding problems with tracking.

Ellie from TD looked into this for me and done a few tests which all tracked when she tried.
i made a couple of purchases that didnt track and also some more after Ellie had checked but these still didnt track , i have had sales track since from visitors to my sites so I assume something on my PC doesnt like the cookie method.
I then changed over to affiliatewindow to check the retailer used and made a couple of purchases, all were tracked no problem.

now my question is does anyone know if the tracking methods are different between the
networks and maybe know how this could be explained????

[Darren M]

The big cashback sites must have a very good idea of what percentage of sales go untracked across a wide range of merchants and networks. I'd imagine it must take up a lot of their time dealing with their user's untracked purchases.

[km8]

I started my Christmas shopping yesterday and the very first sale ...

Give us a break will ya?

Not many merchants or networks claim to give real-time tracking and even fewer achieve it.

Wait at least 24 hours before raising the Spanish Inquisition over a single sale.

Be reasonable for God's sake - maybe the merchant batches sales, maybe the network batches, maybe the merchant reports on dispatch, on receipt of funds - or a thousand other reasons why your sale doesn't show in your reports the instant you click "Submit".

[Cheapdvds]

it may take 24 hours , but if click throughs are not even registering then u can consider that the sale wont be tracked, which is what is/was happening in my case , not sure about others

[roarer02]

KM8

Who is 'us'?

Thanks for your concern - although you may post better comments if you think before typing, or know all the facts about comments you are posting smug and unneccessarliy rude responses too....

Anyway, more importantly, both the network and the merchant agree that the sale hasn't tracked and have agreed a manual commission. Also it was agreed that there was a tracking issue more generally with the merchant. Many other sales from other affiliates on the same day also have not tracked.

Perhaps though they are all from KM8, which will be okay because he/she is evidently quite happy to forego commissions

[km8]

KM8

Have you got a question we could help you answer?

[aldo]

I purchased a tumble dryer from and a dishwasher from Kitchen Science on separate occasions and both times the sale never tracked, Paul Fellows from Buy.at sorted the first one for me but I have been waiting for over a month now to hear from the merchants on the second one.

It has made me ease off the gas and not push the program as hard as I would if I trusted the tracking.

I will be doing the same for any other merchants that I have similar problems with.

[Bud]

Sorry (sort of) to revive this thread, but it's happened again!

This is only my second purchase since starting this thread and the consistent failure to track sales is very very worrying.

I read a post a while ago that suggested we treat failed tracking as something akin to shoplifting, it will happen and there's very little to prevent it, but this is more like Ram Raiding!

[Qui Gon Jinn]

Incredibly frustrating & more reason to look at CPC models to offset which is often better than a merchants EPC.

Trend Graphs may assist.

Affiliates Need TIT » Affiliate Marketing Blog

[lauriebred]

You're all probably aware of the Atlas tracking situation which has resulted in a huge drop in income for many affiliates. I asked a guy at a certain network; lovely people, I love working with them; if it was possible to duplicate the tracking by seeing if there was a difference between the results their own tracking system would have had, compared to those of Atlas, just to put a few minds at rest. This was weeks ago and no reply yet so I'm not holding my breath. Frankly I don't blame the merchant concerned in fact I sympathise, it must be very difficult balancing the needs of affiliates with the demands of merchants (and sometimes vise-versa) when there is a large staff expecting a pay packet at the end of every month. If running a network was easy we'd all have three or four of our own.

The answer is in the hands of all of us. If the product doesn't produce confirmed sales, drop it. If the network doesn't help, find one that does. At the end of the day it's our incomes that are at stake and 'putting up with it' doesn't put food on our childrens' plates.

[Leeky]

We don't do much regarding affiliate sales at the moment but we do hear quite a few moans about affiliatefuture clicks not converting into sales.

We have had no complaints about any other network.

One of our customers has around 100 pages containing merchant links from 3 networks, he makes between £40 - £200 per day, all 3 networks record the clicks perfectly, but he has only ever had one sale via affiliatefuture, the rest of the sales are between the other 2 networks.

Anyone else have problems getting conversions via affiliatefuture links?

Lee