Why do so many affiliate programs have crappy stats systems?
 

Just two examples:

1.) They only provide this month's stats and all-time stats... no daily stats, no previous months' stats, no custom periods, nothing... how are you supposed to track your traffic and sales properly with such stats?

2.) They only provide daily stats for individual sites/products but no daily totals, so it's not even possible to check yesterday's totals. What if you promote 20 or 30 sites/products and want to know how you did yesterday, last week, etc?

Actually in adult it's not as bad as in mainstrean and I don't mean to offend anybody. It just seems like the programmers often have no idea what affiliates need to track their traffic and sales properly.

Xpays
Me :(

programs should really have a kickass stats program with referring urls, days stats, week stats, monthly stats, yearly etc. So you can compare all the time.

I'd be happy just to see the clickthroughs but half the sites I've seen don't even have that. I know people complain about ccBill but at least there's some information there.

Cyn

adultfriendfinder has the absolute, most archaic circa 1997 stats I know of. The absolute worst cluster fuck, and your supposed to just keep sending traffic, and dont give me that sub id bullshit, that works for the first month, but doesnt seperate the rebills or new sales for the next month. How in the fuck does one know if paid advertising is working? You dont, thats the answer :321GFY

Heh I complained quite a bit about AFF as well, in particular the rebills.. when an answer was finally given it was "Affiliates are wrong, knowing if an order is recurring or not is useless information".

i must say we have some kick ass stats

Check out my sig...... There stats are the best I have seen in a long time.

i assume this JB isn't the real JB?

Well, I've been using the handle JB for more than 10 years. I guess you're referring to JB from TCG and that's obviously not me :)

lack of quality programmers - only as strong as your strongest programming resource - inhouse or outsourced

Well, to be fair it's not necessarily the programmers' fault. Many times they just do what they're told. I think I should have said 'It just seems like the people in charge often have no idea what affiliates need to track their traffic and sales properly.'