Once you integrate with your affiliate, you may have a clicks discrepancy, which can happen within a specific offer. This article describes what you should do to find out if it's a real discrepancy or not.
Click discrepancy
The affiliate has more clicks than you
To check the discrepancy, do the following:
Check the Timeframe in which you correlate the number of clicks with your affiliate. Make sure you view the same period on both sides.
Check the Timezone. Make sure you use the same timezone on both sides.
If you work with the affiliate in different timezones, you can check statistics on your end in a specific timezone by switching it:
Make sure you have the whole chain of the redirections, starting with the affiliate tracking URL up to Affise tracking URL. Check the redirections in Affise Checker.
Affise Tracking URL must be right after the Affiliate's Tracking URL, with no additional redirections in between.Make sure you and your affiliate set the HTTP 302 redirect type. All other redirect types can cause clicks discrepancy, as the browser, the firewall, antivirus, etc. can block/ban the redirection flow.
Make sure the traffic restrictions on Affise and on the affiliate’s side are the same (GEO, OS, sub-accounts, etc.).
Look at the following example. The offer's settings on the affiliate's side have no GEO restrictions. On Affise, this offer has only USA in GEO. So you will see fewer clicks (only from the USA) because of the different targeting restrictions. The rest of the clicks will go to Trafficback URL.
Make sure the Affiliate's tracking URL and Affise tracking link have the same protocol (HTTP/HTTPS).
If the affiliate uses Affise too, and the tracking URL contains a custom domain, make sure the domain has the bundle file. Some browsers can block clicks if the domain doesn't contain the bundle file, which can lead to the discrepancy. Read more about the bundle file here.
If all the steps above do not raise any concern, request a click log from your affiliate to correlate the data on both sides. A received click log should contain the following data: date/time/TZ, clickid on the affiliate’s side, UA, GEO/IP, etc. Share this click log with the Affise Customer Support team. They state whether the data discrepancy takes place in this case or not.
⚠️ There can be cases when clicks do not reflect in the system when UA is identified by the UA service as a crawler. In this case, the UA can be whitelisted in Settings > General > Tracking and Trafficback > Allowed user-agent token for the clicks to start appearing.
Please contact the Affise Customer Support team regarding all raised questions via the e-mail: [email protected].