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Credit Where Credit Is Due?

Wednesday, 23 May 2007

A bit of a rant here but nevertheless, still valid.

I dropped a cookie, made a sale and will never receive the commission for it.
 
(I will change the name of the merchant to "X" to protect those who are responsible.)

I advertise X on a couple of my sites but it does very well on one site (sorry about the vague nature of this).

I noticed on my account I had a lead but it was for the value of £0.00. The typical payout is £15.00.

I emailed the network and asked them to clarify why this was shown as zero. Their response was:

"The reason the transaction has appear on your account with the value of 0.00 is due to the fact that it is a post-impression sale. A post impression sale occurs when a user navigates to your site is served the banner but does not click on the creative. The user then performs an action at a later date on the merchants site and the commission is attributed to the fact that the user viewed the banner on your site."
OK, fair enough but they have tracked the sale to me. If someone else had dropped a cookie in the timeframe between the visit and the sale, they would have been credited. So evidently, no one else dropped a cookie. They continued:
"At present X are not awarding commission for post-impression sales however they are looking to implement this in the near future. Having this type of tracking will increase your conversion rate and commission earned on the program."
I KNOW IT WILL INCREASE MY CONVERSION RATE AND COMMISSION EARNED ON THE PROGRAM. That's why I emailed you!

If a sale has been tracked to me, I should be credited. Regardless of when the sale was made, if it was tracked back to me, it's my sale.

If it hadn't shown up on my report, I wouldn't have known and I wouldn't be writing this. But it has, therefore it has been tracked. This is obviously another trick merchants are using to pay less.

Needless to say, all banner links have been replaced with text links.

Pesky merchants. :-(

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Comments4 Comments

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kert01

Eh? So they managed to track someone on your site *without them clicking on a link or banner* ??? Just because they SAW the creative?

Is that scary from the privacy point of view?

I'm interested that merchants are testing this because it doesn't necessarily follow that the creative caused the sale. e.g. You've got some merchant logos on the RH side of this page, and in this post-impression thing if I signed up for an account with one of them in the near future, you would get credit. Even though I know about them already...

Written on Wednesday 23 May 2007 at 14:50:42 GMT (Permalink)

Dazza

PI based sales are not new, a lot of merchants on DGM support this on a very short cookie period.

What I find bizarre is that the sale even showed up. If they're not paying out on PI based sales why are they showing in the stats?!

Written on Wednesday 23 May 2007 at 16:43:13 GMT (Permalink)

Gav

There's a very good chance that the sale you had tracked was attributed to another click source - eg their own PPC etc.

If they start paying out on PI sales, it just leads back to the days where affiliates would have 30,000 banners on one page to drop as many cookies as possible. The merchant can't know whether the user even actually noticed your banner, so it's rare for them to pay out on them, certainly in the affiliate industry.

Written on Thursday 24 May 2007 at 09:54:40 GMT (Permalink)

Mitch

A few networks implement post impression tracking - although most merchants choose not to pay commission on banner views - if the user was on your site but didn't actually click through to the merchants site then you won't get the commission.

This PI tracking increases network and affiliate earnings but in most cases doesn't add anything for the merchant which is why most choose not to use it

Written on Friday 25 May 2007 at 16:05:07 GMT (Permalink)