Discrepancy between Adwords and my affiliate click reporting.

[Shiznaught]

I've been having a discrepancy between the ammount of clicks I am billed for in Adwords, and the clicks that are reported by the affiliate merchant I am sending them to. I don't know if it's a matter of click fraud filtered out by Adwords, erroneous reporting on the part of the affiliate program, or if I am doing something wrong in the way I'm linking my ads.

Basically, I am showing 10x the number of clicks in my affilite stats than my Adwords reports. The interersting thing is that all of these clicks are unique long trail keywords (I am using keyword tracking). For example, my Adwords stats for yesterday show 500 clicks, and my affiliate stats show 4940. Has anyone experience anything similar?

[poster_boy]

How many "invalid clicks" does Google report for your account yesterday?

[justageek]

A lot of times Google will have their bots check links and the "long tail" clicks are a good indicator of that. Google will of course remove them but your affiliate merchant may not be. Have them check their logs for a lot of Google IP traffic.

JAG

[Shiznaught]

how do I check for invalid clicks in my account?

btw, the day before that my affiliate stats showed the same number as adwords, but most days are as I described, with a multifold discrepancy.

[poster_boy]

Within an Account Performance report, under 'Advanced Settings' > 'Add or Remove Columns' -- you can choose "Invalid Clicks" as an option.

I assume this is available to everybody in all accounts, but I've been wrong in this respect before.

[RhinoFish]

some affiliate networks don't report clicks, but unique visitors - check that angle.

if the same person clicks on your ad twice, G shows 2 clicks and many aff network will report this as 1.

[edited by: RhinoFish at 2:53 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2007]

[Shiznaught]

the affilite network reported MORE clicks that probably wouldn't be the reason. i didn't know adwords charged you for non unique visits..

as far as my invalid clicks they are at little over 4% - how does that sound?

[kilkenny]

I'm in a similar situation. I haven't been able to come up with a definitive answer yet but my best guess is that (in my case) it's caused by a crappy spider that's run amok.

Is your affiliate link a regular link that might easily be followed by spiders? If so, that might be the cause for your problems too.

At any rate, try to examine your log files if you havn't already done so. They might provide you with some clues that you won't find in adsense and affiliate reports.

[Shiznaught]

I've definitely encountered the same problem as the op. The number of clicks reported by my affiliate stats are enormously higher than what is reported by Google, and I often do have a lot of different keywords in each adgroup. This makes my affiliate stats less useful, and is potentially a problem for merchants who's network earnings stats take a hit as a result.

[smallcompany]

That's bit too much of a difference.

Which affiliate network you are referring to? I know some will track each click, while some will not (among big ones).

Are you linking directly or through your site? You use search or content or both?