At Moonpull we regularly have conversations with many in the affiliate marketing industry about how affiliate tracking changes or can vary over time. This article will hopefully shed some light on this.
We do see links being inconsistent and the tracking being activated some times and not others. This post focuses on causes particularly applicable to the handover from publisher to advertiser. It therefore helps explain that Moonpull can — and does — sometimes give different results for the same link on different days, or indeed a few minutes apart. This is often highlighting something important requiring investigation.
From a Moonpull user perspective, scheduling links to run periodically can confirm differing affiliate handover performance from one use of a link to another. This is also important to confirm whether a potential handover issue can be viewed as a one-off or should be considered as more of a concern.
Inconsistent but Repeatable Issues Between Deeplinks
Some issues are clear cut and a cause of a tracking matter can be determined from a single audit. A good example relates to a link reaching a 404 page for a deeplink to one specific product or offer page without the necessary URL attributes for setting a cookie being present. This can happen when the Affiliate Network Identifier isn't passed through in the URL. Comparing to a successful link for a different product or page helps identify the cause of such an issue clearly.
To determine whether tracking is not working "because the tag isn't present" similarly benefits from comparisons where the tracking is working in circumstances where a tag is definitely present.
These are examples of inconsistent tracking where one link works and another doesn't. But the behaviour is repeatable at that moment in time making investigation straightforward, especially if a history for the advertisers has been created.
Inconsonant Behaviour
Inconsonant behaviour represents situations or events that are not in agreement or harmony. It's a definition that neatly applies to the circumstance where an affiliate link works then doesn't work, then appears ok for a while, then shows problematic behaviour again.
It's an unfortunate fact that the internet can just behave inconsistently and sometimes connections drop. Common causes include:
- **Website downtime or maintenance:** The website might be experiencing temporary downtime or maintenance - **Server-side errors:** The website's server may be having internal issues - **Server misconfiguration:** The website's server might be misconfigured - **JavaScript performance variability:** As GTMetrix explains, JavaScript performance can cause variability, as can connection speed
In instances where Moonpull identifies inconsonant behaviour, that probably means that an advertiser's users may also be experiencing it.
Optimise or Fix
As we have heard in recent mini-conferences, Moonpull's publisher users are increasingly deciding to take two action paths in parallel:
- Where issues are identified they are taking remedial action to optimise revenue (e.g. change from sending traffic to a deeplink to a home page) or change the advertiser being promoted - Entering into a conversation with the network, agency or advertiser about the matter
Moonpull Share
Moonpull Share is a new initiative for Enterprise Publishers to be able to report an issue to a network via the Moonpull interface; and to syndicate their concern to similar publisher users of Moonpull to provide timely insights as to whether the issue is isolated or has occurred across different publishers.
The BI from each of the publishers is then aggregated to provide a better dataset to the networks and advertisers to help in identifying the cause of an issue, especially one that is difficult to diagnose.
Real-World Examples
- A cashback publisher saw an issue where their BI indicated a worsening conversion rate. Repeated auditing with Moonpull demonstrated the traffic was being sent to a combination of www.advertiser.com and www.uk.advertiser.com. The clarity of the Moonpull reports helped their technical team realise the cause and implement a fix. - An advertiser was running technology for identifying bot-generated traffic. On some days the publisher's links were identified as such and the first party tracking was being withheld. Other days it was fine. This was clear in the Moonpull technical reports. - Typos in URLs can cause some links to fail, when others are ok. Moonpull highlights these clearly.
History Is Key
The more recent data the better, especially with comparable links too. When it comes to Moonpull data, building a history of weekly audits is important to see whether consistently "good" behaviour has changed. Equally having more audits at a point in time can show inconsistency between one link and another.
This is the "breadth" and "depth" approach to building a baseline for understanding tracking matters.
If you would like to see more of how Moonpull can benefit your business, we'd love to hear from you. Please get in touch via our [contact page](/contact).