Testing Tracking
27 Feb
To start off with, tracking does break. It happens. It’s happened on programs that I’ve run and a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) I even managed to break some buy.at tracking as a developer.
So the question that we have to ask ourselves is if enough is done to check tracking from the network perspective.
Sure – a good affiliate manager should be able to notice a problem quickly enough, but not all programs have good affiliate managers.
The networks make a lot of money and sometimes have handfuls of account managers, but how much effort would it be to have a small team of people who’s role in life is to place orders online and make sure that the tracking is working across all their programs?
Lets look at some figures to use as an example. If a network had, for example, 400 Merchants on board.
A tester should be able to place around 4 orders an hour – 8 hours a day – 5 days a week. This means that one tester would be able to test the tracking of 160 programs every week.
Get a couple of testers in and networks would be able to check every single merchant program once a week.
Whilst this may not eliminate the problem it may well mean that errors are tracked slightly faster and tracking is fixed quicker – resulting it more money for both the affiliate and the network.
So why isn’t it done? My personal opinion is that networks tend to rely on Affiliates to warn them of problems with tracking – yet again meaning affiliates are becoming consultants working for free to help the networks gain the mega bucks.
I’d certainly welcome a network that had a more proactive testing department and I’m sure that something like this would encourage affiliates to switch their links across.



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