PPA and Affilates

How do you know you aren't paying twice?

[JustGirl]

I set up the PPA ads a couple months ago. We started off very slow, one or two conversions in January, which is when I think we put them up. In Feb we had about 15 conversions, now, in the last 7 days we've had 15 conversions.

While this still isn't a lot of sales, its growth rate has certainly caught my attention and the attention of my boss. He asked me for order numbers, which of course, I can't give to him. He wants to see if the orders are being returned, and make sure it isn't also being credited to an affiliate.

We aren't too concerned about returns or fraud, but we are concerned about paying an affiliate for a sale and also paying $20 to Google. We were trying to come up with a solution for this double pay problem. We asked our rep and she didn't really have a solution. She reassured us that there wasn't fraud, but there was nothing she could do about the double affiliate/PPA cost.

I thought we could delete the cookies if we had a referral from our tagged PPA URL, but the affiliate manager said that wasn't fair.

Is there a way we can not pay an affiliate if the conversion comes from a Google PPA ad without permanently removing the cookie?

[vincevincevince]

Simple solution:

The PPA URL should be double tagged - once for PPA and once with a test or invalid Affiliate account string.

You probably need to write it to redirect through your affiliate manager's system, so that the URL after redirection is the correct PPA URL.

In that way the affiliate manger will remove the cookies automatically (i.e. replace with with invalid or test affiliate codes which will never be credited).

[skibum]

That's the best way to do it, otherwise affiliates may make a big fuss if retuns start showing up because "our internal tracking system said affiliate #*$! didn't generate the sale" or "other". However, you may still double pay. If the affiliate gets the last click but the person also clicked on a CPA ad prior to clicking on the affiliate ad, you'd have to charge back the Google program. Not sure whether that is possible or not.