Things that make you say hmmmm

Click reports far from matching

[dkoller]

Ok, basic scenario, I have an adword pointing to affiliate program X. Affiliate X, which is large and reputable, provides reports on unique visitors per day that I can match to adwords.

Routinely over a large sample size (thousands of clicks per day) and timeframe (weeks), Affiliate X only reports around 88-89% of the clicks registered by adwords.

I can think of a few reasons how a user could be lost, like if they close their browser within a second or two of clicking the adword, or Affiliate X is down or unreachable to them (Affiliate X is 'always' up though), but I would expect no more than maybe 2-3% loss.

So this really has me wondering about spyware/hijacking software, etc. Has anyone else tracked specific ads to affiliate programs? I don't really have reason to distrust either report, but when 11-12% of my spend is just 'eaten', something isn't right.

Oh, and those of you that track to your own sites, do you get 99-100% matching?

Thanks for any info you can provide.

[roitracker]

Click-to-arrival rates can be as low as 80% (taken from banner ad studies), so I wouldn't be surprised at the stats you mention.

[skibum]

depends if your affiliate merchant is tracking clicks or unique IPs. If it is unique IPs then, yes Google will show higher clicks from my experience. If it is tracking total clicks and not filtering IPs then you will see higher click counts than Google charges you for.

[hobbnet]

Yea, i would say 11% is pretty normal. Typically if the discrepancy is over 10% I start watching things closely, but generally I wouldn't fret much over 11%.

Another thing that could factor into this is how your affiliate is tracking the clicks...They may only be counting a click when their webpage is fully loaded. I believe Google counts a click as soon as the ad is clicked on, regardless of what loads on the advertiser's site.