Links Being Tracked ?

[depaco79]

Hi all,

New affiliate here, please help !

I've gained 62 clicks on one of my links through social media on Sat & Sun however it's only showing 12 clicked within my bet365 aff account.

The url shortener I use is google shouldn't the 2 days add up to the 62 clicks maybe minus a couple as clicked by myself ?

Any advise on this would be great

[Syndicate]

I gave up with bet365 a long time ago. I knew they would be hard to push because most punters would already have accounts. Nevertheless, i added Coral and Bet365 at the same time, and three days later i had 185 clicks for Coral and 7 for Bet365. I wrote and asked if the link was tracking correctly - but no reply. That was the end of that for me!

However, a few weeks back i thought i would try them again (just for fun). Gave them star billing, links with odds, blogged them up (1 click) - this compared to 120 for a poor bookmaker with a very small banner!

Suffice to say ...........

[depaco79]

So do you think they don't display the stats fully ? Because I've got a few mates to sign up who do football accas and they have tracked the new accounts though !

So I'm wondering if it's just the clicks they don't track correctly ???

[JackTenSuited]

Different programs count hits in different ways. When posting to social media sites like twitter and facebook they scan these links for malicious content, some sites will count this as a hit and others won't. I know when posting links to twitter my hit counter shows 100 or so hits yet the actual real visitor count is usually 10 or 20.

[TheGooner]

The discrepancy could be bots. Much of the "traffic" out there recorded on basic impression counters is not human.
Your URL shortener will count them - many aff programs won't.

[Maddi]

in our experience bet365 aren't especially good at converting clicks to signups or signups to depositors, but we have never had cause to doubt the accuracy of the tracking. I'd say TheGooner's explanation is likely to be the right one.

[universal4]

Well said Maddi

Rick
Universal4

[golfbettingsystem]

Sure that some of the bots must be effectively clicking links, seemed to have had a real influx of this over the past 2 days on a few different brands as it happens. Certainly muddies the water in terms of conversion tracking.

[depaco79]

Thanks for your responses this seems to make it much clearer now

Many Thanks !

[universal4]

Don't forget that many many seo bots will show as clicks in addition to other bots.

Rick
Universal4

[TheGooner]

Don't forget that many many seo bots will show as clicks in addition to other bots.

Indeed. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and Yandex are five big traffic hogs that will add hundreds of pages of traffic per website per day.

Then there is the hundred or so other crawlers and bots and ranking tools that add no value at all but run over your site pulling thousands of links at a time.

Throw in Amazon's AWS hosting platform, XLhost, Digital Ocean and you start understanding why conversions are so low - much of the website traffic is nothing more than artificial browser engines.

[zuutroy]

Indeed. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and Yandex are five big traffic hogs that will add hundreds of pages of traffic per website per day.

Then there is the hundred or so other crawlers and bots and ranking tools that add no value at all but run over your site pulling thousands of links at a time.

Throw in Amazon's AWS hosting platform, XLhost, Digital Ocean and you start understanding why conversions are so low - much of the website traffic is nothing more than artificial browser engines.

Doesn't Google Analytics only track humans though? So if you tell the bots not to follow your affiliate links you then should only have human traffic numbers and human clicks to the operators.

[TheGooner]

The OP is using URL shortener - I am sure that the "clicks" tracked via this include anything that hit the page.

While you can screen folders away from some (rare) well behaved bots, the Russian / Chinese search bots are not as well behaved as googlebot. I've explicitly banned them from my site now using their User Agent - as when I started to pay attention I noticed thousands of hits on some days.

Even Googlebot says (on Webmaster tools) that it averages OVER 5,000 pages a day on our site (and a minimum of 1500 per day).

And once you get to the private search / scrape / comment bots - they pay ZERO attention to robots.txt and will blindly follow every link multiple times a day scraping to find content / or comment fields top scrape and spam. Many of these pass for human to most counters.

We undertook an exercise to determine click rates and REAL people halfway through last year - and have developed a large list of IP bans - and User Agent bans accordingly ... about 25% of total traffic but maybe as high as 50% on some well indexed links (affiliate links).

A very significant portion of the traffic out there doesn't involve human eyes.

[blendtec]

I believe at this moment there are some minor issues with the links "imstore.bet365affiliates.com" - banner links from imstore.bet365affiliates seem to be working fine on every affiliate site I checked however links from the "promotional text" sections don't seem to be working correctly.

Any link I have tried shows a blank page saying "tracker". I found several affiliate sites with the same issue.

Not sure if b365 are aware of this or how long this has been an issue but I do believe it happened before for a short period of time.

It's worth checking your links or at least test the promotional links from the affiliate interface and see if you get the blank tracker page.

B

[Stephen_A]

Hi,

We've done some testing at our end and we can't seem to replicate the issue you mention with the promotional links not working. Could you provide any examples please so that we can carry out some further testing?

If you'd like to discuss this further please feel free to email me on stephen.appleton@bet365.com.

Thanks,

Steve

Stephen Appleton
Performance Marketing Manager
Hillside (Media Services) Limited
stephen.appleton@bet365.com
bet365.com