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SiteScout conversion tracking -- flawed design or am I missing something obvious?

by JamesBorg
3 replies
On SiteScout, you can't associate a conversion pixel with a particular campaign. Apparently the system will automatically figure out the correct campaign. This makes no sense to me, but it's possible I'm missing something obvious, so I thought I'd ask here before hassling support.

Let's consider the ideal scenario:

You have a banner on PublisherA.com for CampaignA.
A visitor clicks on that banner and arrives at LandingPageA.com.
The visitor buys your product and arrives at ThankYouPageA.com.
The conversion pixel on ThankYouPageA.com gets correctly associated with Campaign A.

That's all well and good and can be done via cookies, using a most-recent-banner-click strategy for identifying the correct campaign.

But now consider this scenario:

You have a banner on PublisherA.com for CampaignA.
A visitor clicks on the banner and arrives at LandingPageA.com. It's a wall-of-text sales letter, but the headline is enticing, so he decides to bookmark the page and give it a careful read later on in the night when the kids are asleep.
Going back to browsing the Web, he comes across another of your banners on PublisherB.com for Campaign B -- a totally unrelated product.
He clicks on this second banner and arrives at LandingPageB.com. This page repels him immediately -- maybe you outsourced the copywriting to Bangladesh for $5, whatever. Anyway, he leaves at once.
When the kids are asleep, he returns to LandingPageA.com, gets all excited, and hits the buy button.

How does the conversion pixel on ThankYouPageA.com get associated with CampaignA rather than CampaignB? The most-recent-banner-click strategy would fail in this case and associate the conversion with CampaignB.

It can't be a URL-based check, since ThankYouPageA.com is clearly a different domain from LandingPageA.com, and there's no way to specify the thank-you page in campaign configuration. A thank-you page on a totally different domain is a far-too-common setup -- consider eJunkie and digital-fulfillment providers, CPA conversions, and general affiliate funnels.

A cookie-based check is the most plausible scenario, but again, I can't for the life of me figure out how cookie collisions would be handled, given that the most-recent-banner-click strategy is flawed.
#conversion #design #flawed #missing #obvious #sitescout #tracking
  • Profile picture of the author JamesBorg
    I'll add that I've really fallen in love with SiteScout, though. I'm glad that I didn't bother doing the training-wheels thing on BuySellAds for too long -- considered it a total waste of time. SiteScout is where the meat is.

    I find the interface incredibly intuitive and minimalist/uncluttered. They've destroyed Google's interface design in this respect. Going by some accounts, I was expecting a seriously confusing interface, but that's not the case.

    If you have a basic conceptual understanding of site placements vs. RON, contextual targeting, retargeting, and such -- and if you know a bit about common reporting terms and have a tester's mindset -- I don't know why you'd bother with BuySellAds to "get your media-buying feet wet," as it were.

    I actually consider BuySellAds to be for more advanced media buyers, given the almost nonexistent targeting features (not even basic geo-targeting, IIRC). With SiteScout's great targeting features, even a media-buying chump like me can run insipid ads (with geo-targeting, device targeting, demographic targeting, contextual targeting, retargeting, and more), get a not-terrible CTR, and squeeze out a small but scalable profit (vs. my admittedly short-lived experience on BuySellAds, where I couldn't even nail a 0.1% CTR and came out a loser -- enough to discourage the media-buying noob from going further).

    Another good thing is that the people who manage the Google exchange don't seem to be the kind of overly strict tightwads who manage, say, Google AdWords. You can do your bare squeeze pages and your affiliate marketing without any big hassles, as far as I can tell. Maybe the folks at the Google exchange are just more lenient with advertisers who, with a few clicks, can cut off money and redirect it to a ton of appreciative competing exchanges -- whereas they see the AdWords advertiser as a desperate sucker who's prepared to tolerate black-box, opaque Quality Scores, profit-draining policies (e.g., "no information harvesting"), and so on.
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  • Profile picture of the author JustinDupre
    This would be a better question to ask your SiteScout rep. You'll get a faster and more accurate answer unless someone has directly asked them this question before.

    I honestly wouldn't rely on SiteScouts internal tracking. I track through CPVLab for SiteScout now. More accurate, more control, etc.
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  • Profile picture of the author ChrisBa
    I'm agreeing with Justin here, IMO you should use prosper202 or CPV Lab to track.. unfortunately questions like this will likely either be answered by the few that have used sitescouts tracking or the sitescout support team
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