SuitcaseLifestyle.com

So my new site has been up and running for a while, ‘slingin coloured contact lenses.

At the moment it’s just me and a few affiliate friends of mine promoting. Being in my position, I pretty much see the whole process from advertising to sale, and I’m seeing a few things that are a little worrying.

Since my site is very new, it has no decent SEO ranking, so all sales are generated by paid advertising. I’m using JROX affiliate software to track everything and I noticed some strange shit.

Basically a few sales came through and JROX didn’t assign any commissions to anyone. So I did some database digging to match the customer IP address to the affiliate who referred them, and I began to find more uncredited commissions. So I wrote a small script to check for pixel misfires so that affiliates could be credited their monies.

I’ve been in contact with JROX and everyone else along the line, but it seems that for mysterious reasons, maybe customers leave before ‘Thank You’ pages fully load or other things, but conversion pixels just don’t fire. Every time I test purchases myself, conversions track fine, but a small percentage go missing with real customers.

So what does this mean if you’re an affiliate?

Well, it probably means that if the advertiser isn’t checking for pixel misfires like I am, there’s a good chance a small percentage of your leads/sales aren’t being credited to you. Which ultimately could make or break a campaign.

Unfortunately this is out of your affiliate networks hands and in the hands of the advertiser themselves. If they blindly trust their programs to tell them when conversions are being made, they are most likely getting free conversions that they probably think are coming from search engines.