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Dumbfounded by click loss (8)

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If anyone have any ideas it'll be much appreciated.

We've been plagued by an issue of click loss for a few months. Currently we work direct so this isn't through a CAKE platform or anything, we retrieve the click report directly from the advertiser.

There's approximately a loss of 49% click loss at the advertiser's end the last 10 days or so, and that's a huge number, considering we send almost 5 figure clicks a day. We use a DMR, split tested R53 vs Cloudflare vs Namecheap, split test dedicated servers etc and not much breakthroughs. To give you an idea on where we are at, here's the list of concerns:
1. Tracker stealing clicks (this is not an accusation, just listing out reasons. Recently just switched to a new Voluum account so can kinda cross this out)
2. Registrar (Namecheap) is having problems and flagging us
3. Route53 DNS flagging our tracking / DMR links
4. ??????

I'm afraid that we might be missing something obvious and i'm literally wrecking my hair out from this.
If anyone has any insights let me know. If it works I'll treat you to a nice cold beer at AWA (if you're going)

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Have you tried your setup with an affiliate network or other advertiser?

I had that issue with an affiliate network while my setup worked properly with others, so I would say it's most likely the advertiser. As bad as Cake can be, it's at least quite predictable and some direct advertisers use much worse if you can believe that.

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Sometimes, it might be just bot traffic that we're gonna deal with it, I'm using native as my source but still we do see high percentage of click loss from tracker to final offer page ( CAKE platform ). It's even worse when we're pushing ME offers on adult, the click loss might be as high as 70%..... you just need to filter out those bad traffic and have a good whitelist soonest. Not sure about others, that's just our experience so far.

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In fact we have set up with another advertiser with the same issue.

We've worked with this direct for close to a year, and initial few months it was awesome, no problem, split tested with affiliate network and hands down beats them. Now the problem is happening on both advertisers and unfortunately it's easier munching nails for breakfast than getting click reports from a direct advertiser so we don't have the full stats all the time.

It was only until around April-May period where everything starts to go downhill, slowly till now. It's like a slow death. Definitely not due to saturated. Having trouble figuring out which part of the entire funnel could be a problem.

Don't think it's due to bot traffic, and furthermore even if it's bot traffic it should still land on the advertiser's landing page and count as a hit.

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Could be just a problem in the methodology, traffic sources count EVERYTHING cause it looks good and they can charge you for it. Advertisers counts as LOW amount as POSSIBLE - because it allows them to show off with super high EPCs ...

I've seen advertisers remove all kinds of clicks from their reports ... some count all hits, so raw traffic, some count only unique clicks, some try to count unique visits over some period of time, some even required a second click for the visit to be counted ... as you can guess, the difference between what the traffic source showed and what the advertiser reported was MASSIVE.

What's a problem in your case though is this statement :

... can you tell me more about your funnel and what parts of it you actually track? I understand that you have a report from the traffic source (what traffic type is it actually?) on one side and the click report from the offer owner on the other side ... what is in between? Some kind of LP or anything else that could cause a clickloss? Could be that this part of the funnel suffered a burnout and less people are clicking through? Do you maybe record some data here with a custom solution that records data in a DB that grew too big and slows things down?

It's hard to look for reasons since I don't know the full details, there is a number of possible problems here.

Matej.

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Thanks man for chipping in.

It's pop traffic and it's tracked normally through Voluum. Very basic, source>LP>offer. (we run a few in-house scripts on top of that) Highly doubt it's due to saturation as I found out someone was using my landers, and doing massive numbers in the affiliate network side where I'm struggling to get it to work. He/She was even doing it on browsers where I could never get it to work too, so I'm guessing something is definitely broken somewhere at my end and I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure it out.

Anyone who is an expert in this area or feel they could be of help, feel free to PM me and I'm willing to work out a deal or something.

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Hm, the LP is clean, right? Or is it a ripped LP that could contain some "Traffic stealing" script?

Maybe try to run it without the custom scripts then, just as a test, or try a different, but similar LP to see if the results change. Analyze the traffic more too, maybe there are some bad placements that are screwing up the stats?

BTW: Just because someone is using your LPs, it doesn't mean they are also getting good results from it. Affiliates rip stuff left and right, many keep running it even though it's losing them money, because ... hey, the other one was running it too, so it must have been good...

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Has there been a browser update? Sometimes we have seen Chrome updates change stats overnight with particular traffic sources who have not updated their popunder code. See if the loss is consistent across browser versions.

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