I have been, or can be if you click on a link and make a purchase, compensated via a cash payment, gift, or something else of value for writing this post. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.
About a month ago an offer that I was promoting really dropped off. The merchant insisted nothing was wrong, but I didn’t believe them, for very good reason. While this merchant and I have a great relationship, I had customers clicking through with very high intent-to-purchase keywords, and not converting. Luckily, this particular merchant was on two different networks, so I was able to deep-link to get 2 cookies set.
Let’s take 1&1 Internet as an example – on both CJ & Pepperjam. The basic CJ link is http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-2741147-10505076, and the basic Pepperjam link is http://www.gopjn.com/t/2-6273-19981-327.
So on the CJ link, I set the Destination URL to be the Pepperjam link, and come up with http://www.jdoqocy.com/click-2741147-10505076?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gopjn.com%2Ft%2F2-6273-19981-327
Now in theory, only the last cookie is used for a sale, and you won’t have any trouble with this. If one of the tracking methods fail, then the other should pick up the sale. However, in my case, BOTH cookies often fire, so every day I email the merchant the duplicate orders to reverse.
This month alone, 13.86% of my revenue for this one merchant came from the “backup” tracking system.
Originally I set this up as a test, but I’ve kept it in place to capture those would-be-lost sales. If you wanted to go nuts, you could set three cookies, but the time to go from click to landing page could be long.
Comments
LGR
You really need to have a good relationship with the merchant before doing this. It could easily get you kicked out of the program if you don’t. How do you account for sales that take place on a different day from the click. I often see sales happen a week or two after the initial click.
Eric Nagel
Sales that happen after the click should still register in both systems at the same time (at the time of the sale). I’m measuring “duplicates” by the unique ID that I assign each visitor. I use my own custom-written tracking script to do this, but you can do the same with something like Tracking202
David D Ochoa
Perhaps its time to move away from CJ.
PS: how can i circumvent reCaptcha? It’s annoying.
Eric Nagel
@David that was just an example. It was actually CJ that was picking up on the missing sales.
Re: reCaptcha – you can’t. Even I have to enter it, and I’m the admin
David D Ochoa
@Eric Dang.
PandaMarketer
I wonder if you are also double-dipping your tracking with P202 and your custom script.
Eric Nagel
No, my tracking script is enough