Hi Guys,
I am having a problem that I am hoping you can help me with.
We are currently running a banner ad campaign through a large PPC network.
(forum moderator note: we have removed the name of this company, if you write & ask, we will tell you the name of the company)
At this very moment, they are reporting that today we have received 366 clicks on our ads.
These ads lead to two landing pages.
Both of these pages have your tracking code on them.
The problem is that when we look at our unique visitors for today in your software, it says we have only had 216 visitors.
This is obviously an issue since we could not have received 366 clicks on our banners and only have 216 visitors. (Plus, we get traffic from a lot of other sources as well.)
I spoke to several senior people at this company who guaranteed me that their tracking is working without a problem and they have said that the problem has to be on your end. They figure you are somehow 'missing' visitors.
I have no idea what is going on, but I figured I would ask you for your input since I want to make sure we get everything fixed up.
Can you please take a look at the tracking code on these pages and make sure everything looks proper?
Do you have any ideas?
Our first recommendation is this strategy; provide the PPC company with a customised tracking url, for example, mysite.com?=ppc_campaign. This will enable us to precisely identify all visitors they send to you, to be used and/or in conjunction with a separate landing page?.
On the subject of differing banner numbers, these potential explanations come to mind. Please take a look, and we can proceed from there;
1. the PPC company are counting the number of people that they send to you, while we are counting the number of people you receive, which can lead to
differences, think about the number of invitations sent out versus how many
are received. If a person comes from their banner and clicks away before
allowing your page to fully load, the visitor will be counted from the
sending side, but not on the receiving side.
2. there is a difference between unique visitors and clicks. A good number
of people actually do click more than once, so that the visitors (people)
and visits (number of times they click) are almost always different, with
the number of visits? being usually noticably higher.
3. time zone differences; make sure that the two days are lined up properly,
in terms of how the period of a day is defined
4. as you mention, it is important to make sure that all the visitors that
the PPC company provide are coming from the same source?, and if not that they are all sent to the same place (see next sentence).
5. In terms of a solution, we suggest that you have a separate landing page?
for the ad campaign. There can then be little discrepancy about how many
people land on the page, and where they come from.
6. it is of course possible that visitors are being missed, but this is a
rare occurence, and does not occur on a large scale, certainly no more than
a percent or two.
7. if you are trackng visitors then the script is working, it is a yes or no
scenario, there is no in-between space.