Tradedoubler - Tracking Working / How are affiliates doing?

Status
Not open for further replies.

hughdurkin

New Member
Hello all,

Just seeing if any affiliates would like to share their thoughts in relation to Tradedoubler and tracking of sales / leads etc.

On one site of mine in particular, I've been building out various channels (it's getting about 4-5k uniques per day, mostly Irish), and promoting various Tradedoubler merchants with text links in content etc.

I've trialled using display ads to drive clicks and sales, but the tests I did didn't go so well, so I reverted to using Google Adsense to backfill my display inventory.

I've also been using bit.ly to shorten Tradedoubler deep links, and push various offers on Social Media (Twitter and Facebook to be exact).

I just pulled a report for October 2010, and it looks like this (deliberately blacked out the merchant / site details):

View attachment 324

As you can see, for the amount of clicks I generated from one site and through social media, there is only one sale listed.

The conversion rate surely isn't as high as it should be, and with other affiliate networks I use, the rate of conversions to clicks is way higher than this.

I also pulled a report for a specific offer I posted out to twitter. I used a link that was emailed to me by TD with a tracking code in it, put it through bit.ly to shorten it, and sent it out via social media. What's below is for one merchant on one link on one day, but this has happened for other merchants on different days.

View attachment 325

As you can see, 36 clicks were tracked for the link, but no Unique Visitors were recorded. So TD is tracking the link being clicked, but not tracking each unique visitor (or one unique visitor).

Has anybody else had similar issues like this, and if so how have you resolved them? Maybe it's down to the deep link tool or the url format of the links, but I'm baffled by the lack of sales compared to other networks.

Any help from TD or other affiliates most appreciated!

Cheers,

H
 

mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Hugh

If you post ANY link to Twitter it will probably get 30+ hits from bots. So unless you can actually see what is clicking on the links you won't be able to track anything. It's one of the reasons why we set up our own URL shortener a while back.
To prove this I just created a short link to this thread and posted it to twitter. These are the first few clicks:

Code:
72.14.179.62 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:53 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 327 "-" "inagist.com url crawler"
64.74.98.14 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:53 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 327 "-" "LinkedInBot/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla/5.0; Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1 +http://www.linkedin.com)"
184.72.20.245 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:53 +0100] "HEAD /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 327 "-" "JS-Kit URL Resolver, http://js-kit.com/"
69.28.149.32 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:54 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 327 "-" "LinkedInBot/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla/5.0; Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1 +http://www.linkedin.com)"
69.163.176.83 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:54 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 346 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linu x i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091216 Iceweasel/3.5.6 (like Firefox/3.5.6; Debian-3.5.6-1)"
184.72.20.245 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:54 +0100] "HEAD /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 327 "-" "JS-Kit URL Resolver, http://js-kit.com/"
69.28.149.32 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:54 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 327 "-" "LinkedInBot/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla/5.0; Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/3.1 +http://www.linkedin.com)"
72.14.225.129 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:55 +0100] "HEAD /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 308 "-" "@hourlypress"
72.30.142.224 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:55 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 379 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
74.123.148.130 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:55 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 384 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
65.52.2.10 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:55 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 429 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
72.30.142.224 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:55 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.0" 301 346 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
67.195.111.28 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:55 +0100] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 379 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
46.20.47.43 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:55 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 372 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Windows NT 6.0) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5 NjuiceBot"
67.195.111.28 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:56 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.0" 301 346 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
38.113.234.181 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:56 +0100] "HEAD /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 308 "-" "Voyager/1.0"
66.249.65.41 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:57 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 429 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
128.242.241.122 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:57 +0100] "HEAD /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 365 "-" "Twitterbot/0.1"
65.52.22.70 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:57 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 429 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)"
72.30.142.224 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:46:59 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.0" 301 346 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
69.63.180.246 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:47:04 +0100] "HEAD /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 352 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FriendFeedBot/0.1; +Http://friendfeed.com/about/bot)"
86.40.189.215 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:47:06 +0100] "GET /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 372 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-gb; HTC Desire Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1"
204.236.206.79 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:47:06 +0100] "HEAD /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 308 "-" "PostRank/2.0 (postrank.com)"
184.73.68.97 - - [30/Oct/2010:16:47:07 +0100] "HEAD /p2 HTTP/1.1" 301 308 "-" "PycURL/7.18.2"

Most of those are bots
 

hughdurkin

New Member
Sweet,

Thanks Michele for the response, certainly has got me thinking.

Which service did you use to create your own url shortener? I had a look at awe.sm not long ago, but their pricing changed and got super expensive.

I registered s4ve.me with you guys a while ago to create a url shortener of my own, but I wasn't 100% sure if it was a good idea - now it's clear that it's a great idea!

Hugh
 

hughdurkin

New Member
Cheers blacknight,

I bought s4ve.me - short links that save you money through you guys and it's now working as my url shortener, so hopefully I'll get an even better understanding of actual clicks vs spiders.

Hopefully, in time, the data from it will help me to decide which are the best offers to push via social media.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top