What could have caused this?

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SCM419

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Apr 3, 2008
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I've been trying to get this whole situation solved for over a month now, and i want to know what you guys think about this. Whose at fault, and if the outcome was the right thing that should of happened.

I dont want to name drop here so im just going to use made up names until a final decision is made regarding this.

Okay, so on october 16th, to october 30th i did a media buy for the easyweightlosstea . com offer with Affiliate network 123. This campaign ran for two weeks, and according to the media buy network, here are the results:

10/16/08-10/30/08

584 leads
$15,079.02 Spent

This media buy company tracked all of the conversions by Affiliate network 123placing the conversion pixel on the easyweightlosstea offer.

The media buy company also tracks the conversions and labels them as two different types. Click conversions, and view converions. Click conversions are when the user sees my ad on a website, clicks the ad and then is now on the easyweightlosstea site via my aff link. Once they land on the page, they then go ahead and purchase the product right then and there.

A view based conversion is when the user clicks my ad while they see it browsing the web, they go to the easyweightloss tea page via my affiliate link. Then once they are on the offer page, they then decide to leave and reasearch easyweightloss tea some more before buying. Once there decision to buy is made, they then go to easyweightlosstea . com and make the purchase.

So, over that two week span, out of the 584 leads total, 13 of those leads were "click leads", and the rest were "view leads". Now this may seem odd, but from my other media buys ive ran throughout my time this is normal. On search i tend to get more click based leads, and media buys tend to get more view based leads. So this is quite normal from my experience.

Now heres where it gets weird,

Now according to the stats in Affiliate network 123, over the 2 week course that my media buy ran, Affiliate network 123 only shows 13 leads. That means that Affiliate network 123 only tracked my click leads. 13 showing in Affiliate network 123, 13 click leads showing from the media buy company.

Affiliate network 123 uses a 30 day cookie for thier easy weightloss tea offer, so those 571 leads that occured on the cookie, i should have been counted for those leads correct?

Ex: A user is browsing the web on a weight loss website. They see my box ad for easy weight loss tea. They click the ad which then goes to my Affiliate network 123 affiliate link for easy weight loss tea. They are now on my offer page, and an Affiliate network 123 cookie gets placed on there computer. The user then leaves the site, the next day they type in www . easyweightlosstea . com into there browser, and then buy the product from the direct site. They had the Affiliate network 123 cookie with my ID on there comp, therefore i should get credited for that lead. So where did those 571 view based leads go?

Now, there are a few issues that could have happened which could have caused me not to get credited.

A. There was a problem with Affiliate network 123's cookie. Maybe it wasnt working correctly, but i clicked my affiliate link and i saw the cookie on my comp with my ID. I did not buy the product to test if it got tracked, nor could i get a test lead done, therefore i couldnt prove this was the case.


B. The consumer could have clicked another affiliates link and bought the product after they viewed my page. So the user visited my page, had my cookie on there comp, then did there research on the offer, and when they decided to buy the product they clicked another affiliates link and that affiliate got tracked for the lead.

* This could happen, but i just cant see how this happened 571 times. I would think most consumers would have typed easyweightlosstea . com directly in thier browser.

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Ok now i know somthing was definitly wrong, but didint know what could have caused it so i asked my affiliate manager at Affiliate network 123. I talked to him about it and neither one of us knew why. So he put me in contact with wu-yi direct, so i could talk to them about it.

My affiliate manager at Affiliate network 123, told me that i should get a list of all of the IP addresses , as well as the time of day, and the date of all of the conversions that i reported. This way i can prove that i really did do those 584 leads.

So i emailed wu-yi the list of all the ip addresses/times/date that all caused the pixel to fire.

Wu-yi picked a few random IP's out of my list, since obviously they couldnt do all 584, and the few ip's that they checked all matched up with sales in thier database, which proves that all those ip's that caused my tracking pixel to fire were all unique sales.

So they said theres nothing they can do despite all of the ip's i provided matching up.

What do you think could have caused this, should i have gotten a credit from wu-yi based on the info that i provided them as well as all of the ip addresses matching up to sales in thier database?

Discuss.
 


This could happen, but i just cant see how this happened 571 times
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Actually, the majority of the dolts on the internet would have typed easyweightlosstea.com into the google search bar and click through some other link.

I would absolutely not assume anyone will remember that URL when researching, most likely, the research will lead them to another splog or affiliate page, when they are done, they'll click back through to the merchant.

In fact, this is one of the reason affiliate marketing is so good for the merchant, they can have multiple affiliates advertising to the same lead.

One thing I forgot, you should change your landing page to do the the up-sell and send the user using the call to action for *buy* only, it's *your* url you want the user to remember, not that of the merchant otherwise you'll end up in exactly the spot you are in.
 
Ya i thought of that, and that could have been the case but do you really think all of the people would have clicked through to another link? And even if they did click through and purchased through another affiliates link, why would MY pixel fire for that then?

I see what you mean about the users typing into google, but i mean they know its easyweightlosstea.com, so i dont see how every single person would type that into google, when the url is so easy to remember.

If i was on adwords, and i had a google pixel placed on the offer. And a user clicked another adwords affiliate ad, there pixel would fire not mine, so the thing that gets me is my tracking pixel fired for all of those leads.

So, why would my pixel fire if another affiliates url converted
 
Oh and of course you should absolutely have split test this offer via another network so that you can verify you weren't getting fucking up the arse.
 
Ya i should have, but i just glanced at my stats every few days and i finally realized somthing huge was wrong near the end of my campaign so i just let it finish.
 
SCM419 said:
Ya i thought of that, and that could have been the case but do you really think all of the people would have clicked through to another link? And even if they did click through and purchased through another affiliates link, why would MY pixel fire for that then?

If i was on adwords, and i had a google pixel placed on the offer. And a user clicked another adwords affiliate ad, there pixel would fire not mine, so the thing that gets me is my tracking pixel fired for all of those leads.

So, why would my pixel fire if another affiliates url converted
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Sounds like you are confused or you aren't explaining very well, sending someone via Adwords doesn't automatically mean they'll convert to a buying customer, so although you tracked 570 odd clicks on your Ad it's fairly reasonable to expect only 13 of those to convert to actual sales. Depending on how targeted your Ad's were or in this case, the Media buy.

Like I said, when spending that kind of money, split test across multiple networks.
 
Priority_Mail90 said:
Sounds like you are confused or you aren't explaining very well, sending someone via Adwords doesn't automatically mean they'll convert to a buying customer, so although you tracked 570 odd clicks on your Ad it's fairly reasonable to expect only 13 of those to convert to actual sales. Depending on how targeted your Ad's were or in this case, the Media buy.

Like I said, when spending that kind of money, split test across multiple networks.
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No, you understood it wrong. The media company tracks via view and click conversations. A view conversation happens when the visitor enters the advertiser page, but doesn't buy right away, but goes back later, and purchases. A click conversation occurs when the visitor arrives at the advertiser page, and buys right away.

The OP is stating that none of his view conversations got tracked. That it may be a problem caused by the network's cookie.
 
did you confirm from wu-yi that the sales were credited to another affiliate? or did some of them not correspond to any affiliate id at all?
 
TLott said:
did you confirm from wu-yi that the sales were credited to another affiliate? or did some of them not correspond to any affiliate id at all?
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Exactly what I was thinking. Check with wu-yi to see what or who those leads were credited to. Maybe they're sitting in the networks inhouse account, or maybe they're credited to a variety of pubs at different networks.
 
TLott said:
did you confirm from wu-yi that the sales were credited to another affiliate? or did some of them not correspond to any affiliate id at all?
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They didint tell me, it seemed as if they were rushing to get out of the office or somthing. The conversation went like this:

Me: did you run those ips i sent you through your database
Wu-yi: yes we did, we cannot credit you
Me: why, i sent you the exact ips/times/date of every lead i tracked
Wu-yi: those leads you sent were not tracked by affiliate network 123
Wu-yi: we cannot credit you if the network did not track the leads
Me: well, maybe they had a tracking problem.
Me: can you tell me if those ips i sent you did in fact match up with sales in your database
Wu-yi: yes they did match up, they were sales
Wu-yi: my manager says we cannot credit you
Wu-yi: please talk with the affiliate network

So ya, the ip's did match up, and it seems like they dont know the significance of the ip's matching, so i am going to see if my aff manager can get them to credit me. The whole situation is pretty weird, so i guess both sides are kinda confused.
 
I'll definitily ask them if the leads were credited to another affiliate or if they had no id at all tommorrow

BUT, if i had a tracking pixel placed on the offer, the pixel is supposed to only fire if the conversion was under my affiliate ID right? so if the leads did go to another affiliate, my pixel wouldnt of fired.
 
It may be Wu-yi trying to increase their revenue by ignoring any later cookie purchases. Seems so to me from that conversation, actually it seems really clear to me that they didn't award anyone with those sales.
 
That crossed my mind, but it seems as if this is the first time a problem like this occured, so from what i can tell this hasnt happened with anyone else. And i dont see why they would try to scam me for 20k, thats probobly nothing to them.
 
SCM419 said:
That crossed my mind, but it seems as if this is the first time a problem like this occured, so from what i can tell this hasnt happened with anyone else. And i dont see why they would try to scam me for 20k, thats probobly nothing to them.
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If it wasn't for the media's tracking, how would you have known about the view conversations? Just saying that I have rarely seen affiliates be able to track click and view conversations, so they could have just never noticed it. Don't want to accuse Wu-Yi of anything, but just listing a possibility.
 
ROIShareTeam said:
If it wasn't for the media's tracking, how would you have known about the view conversations? Just saying that I have rarely seen affiliates be able to track click and view conversations, so they could have just never noticed it. Don't want to accuse Wu-Yi of anything, but just listing a possibility.
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What do you mean, they wouldnt have noticed it?

Also, if it wasnt for the media network tracking, i wouldnt of known how many are view and how many are click conversions. They can tell the difference because they also place a cookie on the users comp.
 
SCM419 said:
What do you mean, they wouldnt have noticed it?

Also, if it wasnt for the media network tracking, i wouldnt of known how many are view and how many are click conversions. They can tell the difference because they also place a cookie on the users comp.
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I mean that other affiliates promoting the offer wouldn't know. Like I can use myself as an example. I don't use any tracking for view conversations, and I track is normally; just through prosper, and I generate pretty good volume. If I were to run Wu-Yi and it didn't convert positively, I would drop it, without investigating if the view conversations were getting counted. Understand? So they may actually be doing this to all affiliates, just no one has yet to get any proof in front of them, like you have.
 
ROIShareTeam said:
I mean that other affiliates promoting the offer wouldn't know. Like I can use myself as an example. I don't use any tracking for view conversations, and I track is normally; just through prosper, and I generate pretty good volume. If I were to run Wu-Yi and it didn't convert positively, I would drop it, without investigating if the view conversations were getting counted. Understand? So they may actually be doing this to all affiliates, just no one has yet to get any proof in front of them, like you have.
Click to expand...

ahh ya that could be true...great point ill ask them about this.
 
OP: you have to stay more on top of your campaigns. You spent 15k and got 13 leads. How did you not notice after the first 5k you spent that you were hemorrhaging money and pause the campaign? I would imagine you login to your affiliate account every so often?
 
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