Test purchases that track as clicks but never become sales....

[bradmca]

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I have been into the affiliate marketing thing for several years now.. used to do fine out of it as a secondary income but since the economic downturn things seem to have gone to pot as far as sales are concerned.. so I thought I would make a couple of tests recently and see what happened... doing things as cleanly as possible on machines with no malware installed and direct links to avoid redirection complications..

Test 1, I wanted to switch from Virgin media to Sky at our house, so did that through an affiliate link - click registered on the AWin platform no problem, no pending commission either. Along game a fantastic sky installer, shortly followed by a slightly less fantastic BTOpenworld installer but never the less it's up and running and I'm happy with it.. now where's the commission?.. still not there... so I emailed the affiliate team

There was no answer available as to why it didn't track, but after I gave them the order number they could see on the sky system the order existed.. timings corresponded and so gave me the manual credit... for years I have had a well ranking page for sky affiliation... christ knows how much commission has gone up in smoke...

Test 2, fancied new tyres on my car so did the same clean link purchase last week from blackcircles, again the click appears - no pending commission... last saturday I had a nice set of KumHo KU39s installed, still no commission.. I'm still waiting on a reply to try and figure out what might have happened this time..

Has sales skimming gone out of control nowadays... I don't feel like wasting any more time maintaining sites that someone else higher up the food chain is profiting from..

[edwyn123]

Has sales skimming gone out of control nowadays... I don't feel like wasting any more time maintaining sites that someone else higher up the food chain is profiting from..

Hi Brad,

I wouldn't confuse blips in technology with the notion that networks are skimming sales off the top. That's really not a long term strategy that would get us very far

Like you, we had concerns about how frequently sales went untracked and so we conducted research into sales untracked but claimed (by cashback sites) for the first three quarters of 2011 to cover exactly this. You can find the results here:

http://www.affiliates4u.com/news/201...iate-tracking/

I hope this helps ease some of the concern even if I can't give you the exact reasons as to why transactions do on occassion slip through the net (if we knew what they were - we'd fix them!).

The point of note is that network tracking is 98.3% accurate and this research was carried out on a range of over 1,000,000 transactions.

Hope this helps

Edwyn

[bradmca]

Thanks Edwyn,

Having customer feedback from cashback sites does seem like a great place to benchmark expectation against results however I can't think of a single reason why two simple tests from direct links with no cookie restrictions would result in registered clicks, confirmed orders, and no recognition of the sale by the awin platform. A blip is the process equivalent of a product such as a widget, I'm a programmer by profession doing all the kind of things that go on with the backend of AWin so would find unexplained "blips" unacceptable in my line of business where transactions count..

Am I slating the AWin platform?, I'm trying not to, and hoping there is nothing wrong there but at some point in the purchase chain the link got broken for an unknown reason... someone at awin is looking at the blackcircles transaction now, hopefully some insight can be given as to how far through the business process the affiliate side of the transaction persisted.

[chessyb]

I had the same problem with several test purchases I did with Play.com. No explanation was ever given as to why this happened so I ended up dropping the merchant. Nowadays I keep receiving emails asking me to sign-up to Play.com...

[stefcolley]

Hi chessyb,

Hope you're well.

I'm currently the Account Manager for the Play.com programme and am interested to see what transactions these were that didn't track. Could you possibly send me the information at stefanie.colley@digitalwindow.com, please?

Also, apologies that you never received an explanation as to why this was occurring. However, hoping that I can get to the bottom of this for you.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Thanks,

Stef

[bradmca]

I still have AWin chasing the marketing people at blackcircles to see what happened with that test sale.. I chased them directly beforehand with no response.. the AWin ticket says after 3 updates they will update it again when they hear from the merchant so I'm assuming this is the end of the road as far as that investigation goes.

Since our first child came along I just let the sites run on autopilot assuming that a decent proportion of these clicks would convert and just got to a point where I was tired of seeing so few conversions I thought I'd have a test purchase or two.. think I could cut hosting and domain costs out of my life soon as either merchant greed, google algo updates or god knows what just makes affiliate marketing a bit of a dead donkey compared to what it was a few years back.

Tests with TradeDoubler seem to be more successful such as AA breakdown, that popped up and credited nice and fast. Just that so many of the brands I'd like to promote are now with AWin.

[MaximeAWIN]

Hello Brad,

I am the account executive looking after Blackcircles' programme. The merchant is currently on annual leave, but will be back next week. I will make sure I chase this up when he returns.

Kind regards,

Max

[WildStar]

"The point of note is that network tracking is 98.3% accurate and this research was carried out on a range of over 1,000,000 transactions."

Now consider Test1 and Test2
That's 2 consecutive failed transactions in a row, taken at random. What are the chances of that?


(edwyn123)
From those stats then the chance of one failed transaction happening is

success - 98.3%
survey - 1,000,000

thus chance of getting a failed transaction is (((1,000,000-983,000)/1,000,000)) = 17,000/1,000,000) = 0.017 i.e 1.7% as stated

chance of getting two ina row (give or take a bit - I'm not a maths genius!) 0.017*0.017= 0.000289 = 0.0289%
or put another way... 1 in 3460

3460 to 1!

Just think how lucky you are Brad!

"Has sales skimming gone out of control nowadays... I don't feel like wasting any more time maintaining sites that someone else higher up the food chain is profiting from.. "

or that's another way of putting it!

[Cheapdvds]

I would assume the problem is with the merchant and not the tracking of affiliatewindow.

I to made some test purchases a few weeks ago , for one particular merchant that supplies satellite TV, the commission looked great (upto £100) and was looking at creating a site to promote this product.
The order process

Visited website through affiliate link
Link all tracked
ordered product and choose install date
recieve email confirmation of order below

Note: Please note that this email is automatically generated by *** so please don't reply to it.

Thank you for your *** order, it's currently being processed. Your order reference number is *****************.

We just need to confirm some details with you before we can proceed with your order. One of our agents will contact you shortly to discuss your order with you.

Any questions?
If you have any questions about your set-up or if you need to get in touch with us for any other reason, please call us on *************.

Thanks for choosing ***

So their agent needs to contact me to confirm details ? why I have given them everything they need
Receive phone call
The reason they contact me ?

Our system states you have had sky installed in the last 12 months

No I haven’t
They then quickly confirm this and say they made a mistake

Ok we will put the order through

I then ask them to confirm the order will track as I went through a external site and im expecting commission.
No sorry, because there was a query we needed to cancel the order and raise a new order that is now done , but not to worry as I will still get my M&S voucher (wow thanks).
So I kindly ask the lady to cancel the order.

This process was repeated , same emails , same phone call from agent but different excuses used each time such as a problem with payment or card used (you have to pay £10 which is then take from the first bill)

I couldn’t actually work out how to order without the order being cancelled and re raised.

just all too crafty for me , but the links all tracked correctly

[amrob2]

I too like chessyb had (have) the same problem with Play.com. I used to promote Play.com via buy.at and I could guarantee that almost every purchase OF MY OWN would fail to be tracked. It got to the point where I would still promote Play.com, but they would always be given non-prominent positions on my site. Now if almost every purchase of my own failed, how many failed that were not of my own that I do not know about?

Plus I noticed that Play.com used to quite often on the transactions that had actually tracked, deny payment and the transaction used to disappear from my pending transactions. How they could deny payment is beyond me especially as I had the goods in my house at the time, so it wasn't as if I had bought the items, then cancelled the order or returned the item.

With regards to the buy.at network in general, I used to have far more untracked sales on that network than any other network I have worked with. As most of the untracked sales were just a few pence and trying to get replies from buy.at support was a nightmare I gave up querying them. Marks & Spencer on the buy.at network would also be a terrible one for tracking and quite often I would buy something from them, then realise a few hours later that the sale had not tracked, then I would cancel the order, input it again and then that second time it would track.

I am pleased though that the buy.at network is going to eventually be switched off and everything run through AWIN as tracking is a lot more reliable through the AWIN network - saying that though I have had in the last month yet another untracked Play.com sale which I have raised an untracked sale query on.

[Safiyya]

Hi All,

Just thought I'd mention a couple of reason why transactions may not track, some being:

• Anti-virus package is enabled and blocking affiliate cookies
• Browser settings have been set to high - autoblock 3rd party cookies
• Merchant maybe deduping - so another marketing channel maybe attributed
• AdBlocking functionality enabled
• Issue with merchant tracking/merchant not on the latest tracking method which uses 1st party cookies/flash cookies and etag requests. see here.

These are a few reasons why transactions may not track, so it's important that when issues do arise with merchants that you post in a ticket and we'll investigate asap.

Many Thanks,

Safiyya

[IainThomas]

This seems to be an issue we have seen a lot recently and generally with users who have ordered on a mobile phone.

These sales don't seem to show in our AffWin account. Is there a reason for this? I have put through a couple of sales myself this way and they haven't appeared at all.

We are also keen to use the Referring URL tracking to keep track of where our sales are coming from but on several occasions this hasn't shown any information at all. Is there a reason why this occurs?

We are really keen to use this feature but we are currently finding it to be somewhat unreliable and sometimes doesn't even show. When we have spoken to AffWin they have said this might be due to the browser. But we have tested this and sometimes on browsers we know work ie Chrome. It still doesn't work!

Any advice?

Thanks,


Iain

[nick-harper]

I have had 3 or 4 sales untracked since November. It does make you think what are people buying that you dont know of that is going untracked.

[Ben C]

As someone who worked at three different networks and was intimately involved in the integration for all of them, it's been a head scratcher for a long time. If sales from your computer fail to track then it's almost certainly because of a problem at your end, however clean you may think it.

Tracking fails for all sorts of reasons and to differing degrees, and it's often very difficult for a network to assess why. The networks are highly unlikely to 'skim off the top'. There's been lots of their employees pass through who understand their systems and as far as I'm aware there's never been a sniff of dodgy practices with tracking. In fact, given the additional tracking systems that have been developed (Flash, etag, IP-based, etc) they are often tracking more than is likely to be legal once the EU's Privacy Directive gets fully implemented.

Tracking failures can be viewed as client-side or server-side. Client-side tracking failures are in many cases unavoidable, as consumers have the right to say that they do not want to be tracked. They can set their privacy settings a notch above normal and many clients will fail to track as the level of tracking stops working. They can install privacy suites that unbeknownst to the user block specific domains, image calls, clear out cookies and so on. Those blocks can have knock on effects; for example many clients host network tracking within container tags that make adding, changing or removing tags a simple process, but may which in themselves be blocked, thereby cascading the tracking failure to otherwise fine partners. Many tracking systems - including container tags - are set to 0x0 pixel size - a red flag for privacy software that makes them obvious targets for blocking.

Users can disable JavaScript, or if they are on smartphones, often various types of JavaScript functions cannot work, and if they do, work so slowly that the tracking doesn't load before timeout on GPRS or even 3G. And when tracking stops working with a particular computer, it's often unfathomable as to why. I've had a browser on a computer I worked on simply stop tracking affiliate sales and it took complete uninstallation and reinstallation to get it to work again.

Finally it's not beyond the wit of black hat hackers to create trojans that steal affiliate sales. A rootkit, browser plugin or spyware/adware package can monitor your behaviour online and open affiliate links on sites that it detects as having affiliate campaigns, thus stealing commission. Your network is the most likely party to root that out as they can investigate suspicious affiliate activity, though these kinds of 'affiliate' are very clever at covering their tracks and spreading activity over a wide number of accounts. A somewhat related issue is that various cashback and voucher code sites offer browser plugins that do this 'legitimately' - you may want to ask programme managers if they are permitted on the campaigns you run.

Server-side issues are the most frustrating though. The most likely problems come from advertisers messing about with cookie settings, as the worst failures are non-fatal. If all tracking fails, you're relieved as a network technician as it's easy to diagnose and force a fix. However, in most cases these are entirely unintentional; for example the advertiser makes a general change to expiring their own site referral cookies that trigger the network tracking before the networks' cookies are due to expire, thereby removing the network tracking trigger. To them, a nothing change - but with impacts further down the line to their partners. I had a client whose tracking started to fail because new products were not categorised in their internal catalogue systems causing the scripting that output the tags to fail. However the failure was for a small percentage of products - very difficult to identify as the test sales were breezing through fine and overall sales were fluctuating within limits that didn't raise any alarm bells - just gradually downwards.

It's really difficult for a network to check all eventualities and it's amazing how complicated it gets. I've debugged at least 5 clients tell me the their developers couldn't debug their own code so had to scrap it and start over again.

So what can you do? In most cases, suck it up. Client-side tracking failure is an inevitable consequence of adopting a fairly transparent cookie tracking system that is relatively easy to check. Without it the economics of affiliate marketing simply don't exist. Some things just cannot be fixed. For server-side failures, you need to build trust with the advertiser and make an assessment as to whether they would mess with you. If you think they're unscrupulous drop them.

If your returns fall short of what you expect the logical choice is to move your links and try something else. You need to provide an incentive to them to investigate a client; if enough affiliates stop sending traffic it will get prioritised. Don't make it personal and hold it against them - but try to switch back when it is fixed but make sure you make them appreciate the effort.

Don't be afraid to conduct your own test transactions if you suspect a problem - and raise a hue and cry on forums if it's not dealt with. Be prepared to argue your case with evidence though - install the Web Developer toolbar and output the 'Generated Source' or use Firebug if you are happy to show that the affiliate tracking is not loading (one caveat: not all clients use cookie-based tracking).

Also complain regularly; to networks this is information and any network worth their salt will be compiling statistics on tracking failures; if you feed into it you can help get it fixed.

Oh and trust the networks. Build relationships with them. Even the smallest affiliates help them broaden the 'long tail' that clients use them for access to. They're on your side; if you work direct with a client then all the power you have to stop tracking 'failures' is down to the number of sales you send. If you don't send many sales then you need a network to take it on themselves.

Ben

[bradmca]

Ben, your response is excellent, thanks