Quote:
Originally Posted by BigFurry
Okay that sounds good 
Also, regarding the other question in the first post - what qualifies as a unique hit?
Clicking on an affiliate link should show up as a unique hit in the stats?
Or it will count only if that visitor clicks something else or visits the join page? |
This one is a little more complicated. In theory every click on any of our jump links should record a new click in the stats. No further user action would be required for the click to be considered valid.
But let's set a few facts straight first. The click tracking is a little outdated. It's an old piece of java code that hasn't been investigated for a while. For those promoting whitelabels this isn't a problem, since they can link GA with the WL. For those promoting LJ or brand sites, it's a different story, and indeed you'd have to rely either on a third party tracker again, or the AWE stats.
Which brings me to the next point. GA tracks traffic in terms of
sessions and
users. GA users are usually considered unique. For the purpose of this small comparison, let's mirror GA users with unique AWE clicks.
Here is what I found comparing three affiliates for a certain date range pushing PPS links, all branded sites included (only excluding WLs):
Affiliate A:
AWE unique clicks: 765
GA Users: 544
Difference: 28%
Affiliate B:
AWE unique clicks: 29665
GA Users: 25925
Difference: 12,6%
Affiliate C:
AWE unique clicks: 89232
GA Users: 85580
% Difference: 4%
Based on this, we could conclude that rather than clicks being missing, there may actually be a few too many showing. Or, some users are missed in GA due to aggregation of data or some users never even being tracked, possibly.
Having said that, based on these numbers, our click tracking does indeed seem to deviate from data found in GA. But which one is more accurate? And how come the % in difference differs so much between them? Is it only because of volume difference? Or there something else in play?
Either way, if we take these three and take an average, then we're dealing with a 15% deviation, to the upside for AWE compared to GA.
In other words, you can either apply this rule if clicks are important to you, or, as I mentioned earlier, use a 3rd party..
Hoping this answer is somewhat satisfactory and detailed enough :D