Fed up with failed tracking...

[Bud]

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I'm starting to get really annoyed now...

I don't actually buy much but when I do it can very enlightening!

About 50% of MY OWN PURCHASES in recent months have failed to track.

I then have to get onto the network/merchant to ask why this has happened. The answer is usually 'we don't know' or it is a 'one off'.

Not good enough - if I keep getting 'one offs' how many sales are being missed that I have no chance of knowing about?

Am I supposed to make an order then cancel with every merchant to check the tracking?

This isn't confined to one network/merchant either.

My rant over - I feel better now

[tbp]

I get the same, no orders placed from my home PC track, but haven't had the chance to find out why so far, most likely an over zealous firewall.

I think its a fact of life that you are going to get some orders untracked, no tracking method is 100% guaranteed, especially as more and more people put security software on their PC's (some of which is designed to stop people being tracked across sites).

[stevebrowne]

but security software shouldn't have any impact on this sort of thing. It does becuase merchants allow it to. If sessions are killed by desktop software then that is in the merchants favour, so why should they fix it..? They can use other methods to maintain the session (hidden fields, URL bar etc).

I read somewhere that something like 2/3s of all affiliate clicks are "lost".

[pistol101]

When affiliates have non trackers it's often down to overloading your browser with cookies. You browser can only cope with so many cookies from one source (ie network) and once you hit this level it does strange things. Affiliates are more likely to collect the cookies, than your average user.

[tbp]

Affiliates are more likely to collect the cookies, than your average user.

Definately not the problem for me, as I clear out all browser data (cookies, page cache, history) etc every night.

Its odd on mine as login cookies etc work, but never been able to get any sales to track on my home PC, testing with a number of different merchants and networks.

[Bud]

I'm sure cookies isn't the complete answer. I clear mine out regularly and only ever open a link immediately before ordering.

Always ordered from the same PC.

Firewall? Some track, some don't, even on the same network - which would suggest to me my PC isn't the problem.

[Qui Gon Jinn]

"one off" & "isolated incident" are the ones we used to get fobbed off with.

Curious to ascertain any reports on what % of sales don't track & affiliate clicks are lost.

Perhaps cashback sites maybe able to provide some insight with the greater amount of quantitive data they hold, rather than our own on-tracking individual purchase which we commonly share, based on the users they have who are looking for the cashbacks to register & queries they may get from their user base.

[vizzy]

By my observation after running low-profile cashback site for two years and when purchasing for myself...

There are about 5-8% of those who claimed lost purchases.

These figures doesn't look that bad, but strangely enough, my own purchases are tracking much badly. Amusingly enough, I always purchase "in session" (ie without leaving site after following affiliate link), when I purchase I look at the source code of the page to find tracking pixel and in most cases it was there.

I would rate most exposed networks as follows (in order from most to less missing
plus a chance to shame some merchants ;):

1. Tradedoubler (though, I never had any disputes with them claiming untracked transactions.)
2. AffiliateFuture (recently, for instance, PhoneBoxDirect refused to pay for two untracked transactions for my website user, motivating it was too late (after 30 days) to claim).
3. AffiliateWindow (recently, bought something from EuroPC; terrible experience: order arrived weeks later, I almost forgot about it. Sale did track, however, even before order has arrived, EuroPC marked it as "declined" for a reason I would love to hear. Commission was only about 50p, so I didn't waste my nerves on them.)
4. CommissionJunction (very hard to claim anything, they always refer you to contact merchants directly, don't bother to help resolving any issues).
5. Buy.At (almost perfect)

[Bud]

Very interesting post Vizzy - thanks.

You say 5-8% claimed lost purchases, so would it be fair to say this figure is probably a lot a higher as many wouldn't bother claiming?

[aotagain]

I've bought 4 things recently for Christmas, plus some insurance, which happened to need anyway and deliberately bought off 4 different merchants.

The insurance produced a click but no sale, which was no surprise as the merchants buttons were playing up and after going back and forth a couple of times I assumed it wouldn't track properly (am I a realist or a pessimist ?)

2 out of the other sales didn't track.

Wouldn't it be nice to have some sort of 'last tested' date by each merchant as a quality mark ? The stats are all very well, but we've found conversions vary hugely depending on what the publishing site promotes. We've had 'good stats' converters do little and 'bad stats' converters do well. Knowing the tracking was working recently (all of it not just the banners) would give great confidence.

It would be nice to know that the merchants/networks carry out regular tests, with publicly known dates and frequencies.

Or could we (affs) have our own set of test transactions - that would be better.
We can test our Worldpay payment system easily enough with a dummy transaction.

That way we could do the networks work for them

I know for a fact that tracking can go AWOL for months without being noticed.

[aotagain]

On reflection and a clear head, I think the idea of dummy test transactions for affs. might be completely unworkable as it would make a right mess of merchants stock level control/ records ? At least tracking right through to payment would I think...setting up a dummy route through a cart/checkout process doesn't sound viable.

How do the networks test the tracking anyway ?
Do they test each type of link with a dummy transaction ?

[Orvis UK]

This is very frustrating. I am a merchant but also shop through cashback sites and have my own affiliate site (which I only really use for my own purchases as I haven't had much time to do anything with it!). I have made several purchases over the past year and I would say about 20-30% have failed to track - esp annoying when a couple were for insurance so would have been large commission.

As a merchant I'm more than happy for affiliates to contact me if they think their tracking is not working. If an order number is known I can look into it within seconds. I understand this isn't always known though but I can look at other things. As well as using Affiliate Window's tracking we have our own tracking adv codes in place. We also use Coremetrics tagging so can view their reports. Admittedly if I run a report from all 3 sources the numbers do not match although this is all to do with the cookies, etc.

[Deltrus]

I'm very new to affiliate marketing but from what I'm reading, tracking seems to be quite an imprecise art. Obviously affiliates would want to get paid a commission for each and every sale that was generated by them. With fear of stating the obvious, this isn't currently happening.

For the amount of time and money affiliates invest in promoting merchants, the rate of failure seems staggering. I'm surprised there isn't much more going on to fix this. Shrugging it off as part of affiliate life is not good enough.

After all the only real loser is the affiliate. The networks don't suffer much and the merchant gains free advertising and more sales at the affiliate's expense.

I don't know which other industry would tolerate such a state of imbalance.

Maybe it is because the industry is still young and maturing. Maybe with technological advances this will all become a thing of the past but for now affiliates are getting a raw deal.

Ranting isn't going to get us anywhere though, so now I will retire back to lurking mode and try to think of a solution. If I crack it I wonder if there would be any interest?

[Bud]

Deltrus

I completely agree with you. I'm starting to wonder if we have had our communal 'head in the sand' for far too long. These figures and reasons are not acceptable on any business level and as you say, "the rate of failure seems staggering".

While it's not unusual for us to moan about commission levels reducing, the failure to track, and on such a massive scale, is not being considered. This needs to be addressed.

[tbp]

The networks don't suffer much and the merchant gains free advertising and more sales at the affiliate's expense.

This isn't strictly true:

The networks lose out because they get a commission override for each sale, so if sales aren't tracked then it means that they lose money. Also, if a merchant thinks that the volume of sales from affiliates than it actually is, they could drop the network as they think its not worth paying the monthly fee.

The merchants may get orders free without paying commission, but after a while the affiliates are likely to think they are performing badly and drop them. For a few free sales, they could be losing out on a much larger number of sales passed by affiliates actively promoting them.

You would think that this would spur them into action, but sadly it doesn't. This doesn't apply to all networks though, some are a lot more pro active than others when it comes to sorting out tracking issues.