Why Not Tracking Your Campaigns can Cost you Money!

Posted on August 22, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, PPC, Yahoo Search Marketing  

You can read everywhere that people suggest you track you campaigns and statistics, even on this blog. Meaning not relying on Google, Yahoo, Msn or other networks to rely on them to send you just the country or target traffic you are paying for.  There are many programs out there that you can pay for that will track the IP’s of your visitors and be able to tag to a certain campaign, or you can have one built. I personally had one built for me as the ones out there worked but I couldn’t get the information I wanted or get it in the way I wanted it. Yes this cost me a decent penny to get this tracking program built, but it has paid for itself already several times over.
Take this example. I am running a campaign on yahoo search marketing and I was checking my program stats and noticed that I was seeing a lot of traffic from foreign countries and my whole account is set to US only.  So I dig thru my stats for Aug 1 thru 13 and find that anywhere from 10 to 25% is from foreign countries.  So I log into my Yahoo search marketing account and contact them letting them know what I am seeing and attach a report for just one of the days and state that I am seeing this on all days Aug 1 thru 13. A day later I get an email stating it has been escalated to their click fraud department and I should get an email in a few days. Two days later I get this email:

Our investigation concluded that your account experienced one or more occurrences of the following situations:

?        Unusual end user activity or behavior
?        System issues

As a result, we have issued an adjustment to your account in the amount of $X,XXX.XX. This adjustment should post to your account within three to four business days. You can view your billing history through the Reports section of your account by selecting the Billing Transaction Detail Report.

To protect the integrity of our systems, we unfortunately cannot provide you with the specific details associated with the identified pattern of behavior. We want to assure you that we are always working to improve the quality of the traffic delivered to advertisers and as such we are taking the appropriate steps to help prevent these types of activity from occurring again in the future. Our sophisticated Click Protection System runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is designed to prevent advertisers from being charged for certain clicks. However, there may be instances, such as this one, where we make additional adjustments to your account.

As you can see they don’t come out and say we agree with you that you received foreign traffic, they did offer me a nice credit. With that said I was making a profit on the campaign even with this amount of foreign traffic being sent. So the credit is just icing on the cake, but this is something that is deserved by me as I am paying for US traffic not foreign traffic. This is just one example of why you need to track your campaigns by a third party software that tracks IP addresses etc. to monitor it for foreign traffic or even click fraud that you are billed for.  One other instance you can read about is from PepperJam Search and their $10,000 “Goodwill Credit” .



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Comments

6 Responses to “Why Not Tracking Your Campaigns can Cost you Money!”

  1. Grant on August 22nd, 2007 10:03 am

    Awesome post. i’ve been meaning to inquire more about this. Is this something such as a particular URL that use use for destination PPC URLs that captures the data and stores it in a database as the user gets redirected to the destination?

  2. CPA Affiliates on August 22nd, 2007 10:17 am

    Mine is setup server side, so wether i redirect or send them to a site on my server I capture their Ip info etc.. into a database. but i also tag the subid in affiliate link with an assigned tag for tracking purposes.

  3. Dave Starr --- ROI Guy on August 22nd, 2007 4:32 pm

    Interesting post. And an interesting subject, since a majority of affiliate marketers are based in the US and seem to think that the US -is_ the world … thus ignoring the vast majority of the world’s population … not all of whom are poor by the way.

    Google knows how to deal with this issue seamlessly … Yahoo! has been struggling and fumbling with it for years now.

    Here’s one example to keep in mind when you “hard code” blocks against non USA traffic.

    I’m a US citizen who happens to chose to live in the Philippines. There are several hundred thousand from the US, Oz, UK and EU countries here like me. I have an average US level income and tend to buy as much as I can from US sources. There are at least as many expats like me in Thailand and significant numbers in other Aisan countries … not to mention thousands of highly-paid engineers and managers working here and in India in the call center industry (the press neber reports how many lucrative overseas jobs that have been created by “off shore” job movements). And several times as many Western professionals in Iraq, Qtar, et al in support of the Iraq war … people with tons of funds and no place to spend them.

    Anyway, some offers of course can’t be of use to anyone not physically present in the US, but many can, and that’s my point … think through the full ramification of blocking people from offers strictly by IP address.

  4. CPA Affiliates on August 22nd, 2007 4:50 pm

    You have a very valid point. You do have to keep your options open and this rule of thumb doesn’t just apply to US, maybe you are bidding on UK only and you get US traffic same rules apply you are paying for people from a specific country so you shouldn’t be expected to pay for traffic from any other country.

  5. Amit on August 27th, 2007 2:21 am

    Which tracking service do you recommend? As far as I know Statcounter does IP address tracking..do you think its a good choice for anyone who doesn’t have deep pockets for a custome made stats tracking service?

  6. Seb on August 30th, 2007 1:32 am

    The problem with tracking is that most CPA companies doesnt allow to use actions on your landing pages, instead of that you need redirect visitors to their langing pages where the action form is placed. If the action form is placed on marchant landing pages I can’t check which keywords and from what pages traffic converts. That’s a big pain.

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