I see people wondering that the various reports of clicks don’t tally.
A typical observation for people who use Google AdWords to drive traffic to the product/site for which they are affiliates is that the number of clicks in AdWords report don’t tally with the number of clicks in the report from the site offering the affiliate program? So, how can this be?
Another question I have seen is that the clicks don’t tally with their statcounter or some other web statistics counter reports. Why does this happen?
Here is what happens. When a user clicks an ad, the following things happen
1. The link request goes back to the ad server
2. Which then validates, records the click and redirects the user
3. The redirected url then takes the user to the website of the ad
4. Some agencies and other secondary networks might be taking money from you and advertise on your behalf on the primary networks. In this case, there is going to be multiple redirections.
5. After all the intermediate redirections, with always at least one redirection, the request from the user browser finally is made to the web server of the ad
6. The page is then rendered by the browser and along the way, picks up any website counter javascript
7. This javascript code results in another request to a counter website like statcounter
8. The counter website then updates the stats for the counter.
So, as can be seen, in the entire process, there can be several points of failure each of which contributes to a lower counts in the down stream. As long as the moment the ad server records the click and redirects till the stats counter is updated, if there is a) network failure or b) server failure or c) user not letting the page to completely load so that the stats counter’s request is complete, these clicks are not recognized.
One of the way to increase the accuracy is instead of relying on a 3rd party counter, rely on your website logs. Web site logs are more accurate because any kind of failure between 6 and 8 above doesn’t matter. Your website’s access log already would have registered the click by then.
If you are investing some serious dollars into advertising, here are some ways to ensure you have proper accountability
1. Don’t use intermediate agencies/networks that only adds to further redirection and increases the chance of failure. Think of it as having to take multiple flights to reach a destination. If any of the flight is delayed, you won’t reach your destination on time (and in this case, the user won’t reach at all and hence may end up clicking the original ad again or may simply click your competitor’s ad or just leave)
2. Don’t rely on 3rd party counters. Rely on your web server logs.
3. Use special urls for your ads so that they can be uniquely tracked from rest of the accesses. Even if your landing page is static, simply adding extra parameters to the url such as
halloween_costumes.html?channel=google&campaign=halloween&period=october
where the halloween_costumes.html is a static html page still records the parameters in the access logs! You don’t need a dynamic pages website to track your ad clicks!
