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⚠️Watch Out Your Stats - Your Campaigns Might Be Bleeding Money⚠️ (15)

11-08-2018 02:51 PM #1 platinum (Veteran Member)
⚠️Watch Out Your Stats - Your Campaigns Might Be Bleeding Money⚠️

Hello everyone,

Recently we got several reports from our users where they were noticing a miss-match between the clicks from the traffic source and the campaign link visits recorder in their tracker like in the below screenshot.


Disclaimer: This screenshot was provided by one of our long time users and we are sharing it with his permission.

At first we thought this could have been a possible issue with stats aggregation on our platform, but after carefully investigating several cases, it looks like the problem is with the traffic source/publisher.

As you may notice from the screenshot, clicks coming from these publishers are not going to the designated campaign links in the tracker, while on the other hand you are still getting charged for these clicks.
It may not be disturbing if this happens randomly with only a few clicks, but on a larger scale this can seriously hurt your campaign ROI.

Deploying a simple automatic rule like this, will help you save quite a lot on your ad spent that is getting wasted on such publishers.

Block All Widgets with TS Clicks > 20 and TRK Clicks < 1 and Conversions < 1 based on the stats of the Last 30 Days

Hope this helps!

11-08-2018 04:11 PM #2 erikgyepes (Moderator)

That's interesting.

Do you have any ideas what could cause these?

I can understand this kind of discrepation when buying traffic on CPM basis where the charges are higher on TS for a low CTR placements, may this be the issue here too?

11-08-2018 10:01 PM #3 platinum (Veteran Member)

Quote Originally Posted by erikgyepes View Post
That's interesting.

Do you have any ideas what could cause these?

I can understand this kind of discrepation when buying traffic on CPM basis where the charges are higher on TS for a low CTR placements, may this be the issue here too?
Based on the feedback received from reps, odds are these might be pure fraud.

11-09-2018 12:17 AM #4 sprice (AMC Alumnus)

I was one of the users receiving this issue. RevContent rep didn't sound too surprised by this and basically said just to blacklist the widgets with this issue.

Click image for larger version.  Name: Screen Shot 2018-11-09 at 6.11.51 AM.png  Views: 77  Size: 143.6 KB  ID: 19974

11-09-2018 07:46 AM #5 platinum (Veteran Member)

Yeah, the most disturbing fact is that one can easily burn a few hundred dollars on a single campaign in a few days if not checking stats carefully. Multiplied by the number of campaigns it can go up to thousands on average mid-low budget camps.

11-09-2018 08:14 AM #6 leadcloak (Member)

Interesting! Yeah, it'll help for sure.



LeadCloak

11-09-2018 08:34 AM #7 daanja (Member)

I find it even more disturbing that whoever uses a tracker alone, will never even find these placements, since they obviously do not show up on the tracker

11-09-2018 12:53 PM #8 erikgyepes (Moderator)

Based on the feedback received from reps, odds are these might be pure fraud.
Ouch, that's not good, not good at all..

11-10-2018 02:57 AM #9 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Wowsers! Thanks for the heads up platinum!



Amy

11-11-2018 09:51 PM #10 sprice (AMC Alumnus)

Quote Originally Posted by daanja View Post
I find it even more disturbing that whoever uses a tracker alone, will never even find these placements, since they obviously do not show up on the tracker
This is exactly what bothered me. Had I not started using TheOptimizer recently I would have never even noticed these placements and would have continued burning money.

11-18-2018 05:00 AM #11 vortex (Senior Moderator)

Quote Originally Posted by daanja View Post
I find it even more disturbing that whoever uses a tracker alone, will never even find these placements, since they obviously do not show up on the tracker
This is exactly what bothered me. Had I not started using TheOptimizer recently I would have never even noticed these placements and would have continued burning money.
Some traffic sources offer placement/zone/widget stats though. For those, we could download those stats, then download tracker stats, and use a spreadsheet to automatically match them up by placement ID.

But of course - way more convenient when you're using theoptimizer.



Amy

11-18-2018 01:23 PM #12 daanja (Member)

Quote Originally Posted by vortex View Post
Some traffic sources offer placement/zone/widget stats though. For those, we could download those stats, then download tracker stats, and use a spreadsheet to automatically match them up by placement ID.

But of course - way more convenient when you're using theoptimizer.



Amy
Revcontent isn't one of these traffic sources

11-19-2018 09:16 AM #13 bbrock32 (Administrator)

Revcontent isn't one of these traffic sources
Yep true, on RevContent the only way to get widget stats are only via the API.

Also on Outbrain, certain features like custom bidding per creative is only doable via the API.

So people that don't use the API directly or through tools like TheOptimizer are missing out on these features.

12-10-2018 02:07 AM #14 cosmeivan ()

Same thing happened to me.

I ran some camps for a few weeks and in the third week I used Drive for auto optimisation.

Some widgets spent a lot and have many clicks on the TS and almost zero clicks on Voluum.

And yes, TS was RevContent.

12-16-2018 06:06 PM #15 geobak (Member)

This happens when traffic sources mix push notification traffic with regular native traffic.

Especially with Revcontent you will have to blacklist all of their push notification widgets ot be sure that this does not happen to you.

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