Questions and issues over tracking and reporting online ads have persisted among agencies, media vendors, ad servers, Webmasters, and clients since I started my career. Terms and procedures around tracking have not been standardized, resulting in lots of confusion.
Last time, I listed five common tracking and reporting issues and offered sensible approaches to deal with the first two. In this column, let’s examine ways to address the latter three tracking issues.
The five most common tracking and reporting issues are:
- Why online reports aren’t 100 percent accurate.
- Why view-through conversions are not conversions.
- How double counting occurs in different systems.
- Why tracking from different systems don’t always match.
- How to compare first-click conversions versus last-click conversions.