Tracking outclicks versus sponsor stats
 

Do you guys track your outclicks to your sponsors?

I track every one of my affiliate outclicks, along with a history of the surfer's progress through my site and his original referrer.

Thing is, the outclicks I record almost never match the hits my sponsors show. Depending on the sponsor, I've had some show less than 1/2 the unique clicks as I think I should be sending them...

Ideas?

some sponsors show only 2nd page hits :P

I know, I was referring to ones that split it up into "1st page, 2nd page, raw, unique" etc.

Maybe I'm just frustrated that they're not documenting what they're showing :)

I just count green rectangular wallet sized pieces of paper at the end of the day.

THAT is of course the bottom line, BUT (and I'm sure that there will be those who *wildly* disagree), your figures also likely reflect a degree of shaving (*gasp* "How DARE you say sponsors shave!?!!")

It would be interesting to plot the figures over time, to see if a pattern develops illustrating an end of month increase in those differences...

:winkwink:

... converting 1:120 looks much better than the truth.

How true:BangBang:

i track my outclicks. and then divide by the numbers on the previously mentioned wallet sized green stubs.

and thats who gets my traffic next month :)

one thing to point out is that not all the time they get to the sponsors page or let it fully load to where the tracking pixel is invoked.

If you have ever a choice in the matter when placing tracking pixels, always place them at the top of the page rather than the bottom. The top of the page is the first thing that loads so it will be counted correctly more often than a code place at the bottom of the page.

thats why always put your tgp in hits on top:D

Good tip, but that's not how I do it. :)

I redirect all my sponsor hits thru a php script. The script does basic counting and also gives me the ability to quickly route selected hit to a different sponsor.

Many of my sponsor only show second-page hits. The ones that show first page - I get varying results with respect to counts matching.

As long as they are within 10% or so, I chalk it up to slop. Much more than that and I might redirect somewhere else.

One of the most interesting revelations is to see which banners/text people actually click. Have had a couple surprises there :)

Does the php script compromise the partner code at all?

At one time, some sponsors I had didn't allow using tracking urls.
I've never been sure why?

Also, I was told that trading traffic using a cgi like autorank and tracking hits sent to a php doorway doesn't count 20 percent of the hits. I've never gotten an answer why that is or if it's even true.
Because I heard that from another webmaster, I never attempted to track partner codes this way. I notice that when I test it from cgi to cgi, the hits are always right on.

What's the best program to track with?

Sounds almost identical to my setup :thumbsup

this is true, but they should say it :2 cents:

I've had no particular problems. Since I'm using "header redirect", the original URL is the one the sponsor sees, and on the sponsors that show that, I can see the original (free site) URL.

I wrote the script myself. It's not very complicated at all. I'm doing everything in flat files rather than MySQL, which is fast but somewhat limits the amount of info I can save. Someday I will rewrite it to use MySQL.

But it is cool to be able to switch between CEmag and FreeEzine in 1 minute.

I assign every surfer a session id that gets tracked through the site...

I like being able to see how many surfers from what referrer clicked on what banner.

Sweet !

Does your script take into account that some people double click links?

it should if he is using cookies.