You should never base P/L decisions on data from your tracker, always have a separate spreadsheet where you calculate it yourself with spend data from the traffic source and conversion data from your tracker or your affiliate network.
There are a couple reasons that could lead to a discrepancy in both ways:
- traffic source lets some traffic slip through that you didn't target, but doesn't charge for it (think other GEOs, desktop traffic on a mobile campaign etc.)
- clicks being "lost" because your LP didn't load, the redirect didn't work, the traffic source did some shady shit etc. (this would lead to a discrepancy in the other direction though)
- etc.
At the end of the day,
Couldn't agree more with @andyvon. The only tracker that I'll trust to give me accurate spend data is POFpro, or something similar where it actually has direct access to the spending data from the traffic source.
Otherwise there are too many things that can go wrong - as you've found, tiny errors that multiply up.
Nicely spotted on that, btw - many people would have never noticed!
Yes guys just like you can edit on POFpro you can do this edit with