Often people ask this question as their traffic source shows more clicks than either their tracker and/or affiliate network. This can occur for a number of reasons, here is a basic listing below:
- Timezones – often the traffic source, tracker and affiliate network can all be located in different timezones. This can play a huge part in why your clicks aren’t matching.
- How software registers clicks – each software (affiliate network software, tracking software, traffic source software) all track clicks differently, they can even track unique clicks differently (eg. Think PPV – a PPV traffic source could record the view when it is delivered, however your tracking software and network might wait until the full page loads or wait until the visitor is on the site for a number of seconds).
- Hosting – What are you using for hosting? If you are using shared hosting or cheap VPS? This can also be a HUGE contributer to click loss, we recommend that you buy a quality VPS from a provider such as Beyond Hosting.
- The internet isn’t perfect – sometimes things just don’t go right, connections get dropped, etc. While this is a valid reason, this should not count for a high percentage of click loss, but it’s worth mentioning.
Keep in mind, there are things we can control and there are things we cannot control. I recommend for the things we can control (such as hosting, etc) we make the appropriate adjustments to minimalize issues such as click loss. For the things we cannot control, don’t get too bend out of shape over it, there is no point in worrying about something that we cannot control.
