The Problem with cookie free tracking
Greetings all,
I had an issue the other day with sales appearing in the network account that I knew shouldn’t have been tracked.
The majority of these sales were staff members & a few were trade (account) orders that the telesales staff had keyed manually onto the site.
I investigated this further & discovered that the network was using the IP Address to track the sale.
With my affiliate hat on, this is all well & good, as it’s likely to minimise leakage, however once I delve a little deeper, it’s just plain wrong.
I work for a large multi national with 10′s of thousands of users who all have internet access through a central gateway – this gateway has 3 public facing IP Addresses. What happened in this case is that someone somewhere within our network (10′s of thousands of users remember) had clicked on an affiliate link (one of the big voucher code sites). Then a little while later, another one of the thousands of users made a purchase – the network tracked the sale & because they’d seen an affiliated click from the same IP attributed the commission to the large voucher code affiliate.
Now I’m not sure if the network consider the IP address as more important than a cookie, or if they only use the IP if there’s no cookie present, but this could lead to all sorts of problems.
Let’s imagine the following scenario (happening in this order) :-
- Customer A (who is one of the thousands inside this network) clicks on affiliate 1′s link
- Customer B (also inside the network) clicks on affiliate 2′s link
- Customer A completes checkout
- Customer B completes checkout
- Customer C (also inside the network) completes checkout
- Customer D (also inside the network) completes checkout
Who get’s what commission? What I think everyone agrees should happen is that Affiliate 1 will get commission for Customer A & Affiliate 2 will get commission for Customer B & Customers C & D don’t generate any commission. However, what would actually hapen is that Affiliate 2 would get all of the commission for Customers A, B, C, D.
Here’s another scenario:-
An affiliate who is within the network of thousands spends some of his lunchbreak working on his affiliate sites & during the course of checking links etc, he clicks on a couple of hundred of his own links to the networks top 200 programs. The network will then attribute all sales from that IP Address to the affiliate – even if the network are only using IP Tracking for sales where there is no cookie present, this could still amount to a huge amount of sales which the affiliate isn’t entitled to & the merchant shouldn’t be paying commission on.
It’s certainly food for thought…….
TTFN
BFG
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This entry was posted
on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 20:50 and is filed under Affiliate Stuff, Tech Stuff, Various.
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