Difference between my tracking and merchants.

[grafx77]

I currently have 4 merchants that I am reviewing on my affl. website. I have been lucky enough to talk one of my merchants (the highest paying) into placing an affiliate tracking script, from my tracking program, onto his "confirmation page" so that I can accurately track my PPC ads to sales.

From the time period of Nov. 16-31, my tracking program "Adwatcher" has tracked 15 sales. My merchants affiliate sales tracking app. "MyReferrer" has tracked 13 sales. No big deal......a few sales off, no sweat.

From the time period of Dec. 1-4, my tracking program has tracked 7 sales and my merchant has tracked only 2. I added yahoo ads to my arsenal on Nov. 31st, so this is the reason for my jump in sales and clicks. I have made the affiliate manager aware of this gap and am awaiting a response back tomorrow.

My question is.........Have any of you all in this community who use an off-site affiliate script to track sales, through your tracking program, experienced a similar gap in sales? I would like to know if this is common or if it may be an error on the merchants tracking software or mine.

Any experiences are welcome.

John

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hello John,

I'm afraid that I can't share a similar experience with you.

Did the affiliate manager get back to you? Can you tell us what he or she told you?

Thanks,
Ros

[grafx77]

Hello Rosalind,

I am very happy to report that the merchant did get back with me the next day. He reported that there was an error on the confirmation page, so that the sales were not tracking for the last day or two. He apologized and credited my account for 7 sales that were missed on those days, which came out to be $110.

I would have never caught this unless I had my ad tracking software there to let me know that there was a gap in sales. It didnt really seem like the merchant was aware of this problem and would have continued to happen.

My lesson from all of this is, if you have an adtracking program that has the ability to track sales from the merchant's confirmation page via a remote adtracking script, take the time and ASK!

I always ask my merchants now before I promote if they will add the one line of script to their confirmation page. If they don't respond, I either wont affiliate with them or I will post them onto my website and not promote their service/product as much as the next merchant who has been cooperative enough to post the script.

I assume there are alot of people out there today spending their time and PPC money on advertising a product/service for a merchant that may have a few sales fall through the cracks here and there, due to negligence or errors. These definately add up after awhile and can equal hundreds of dollars lost in the long run. Again, I would definately reccommend to protect yourself with remote adtracking scripts.

Regards,
John