Just in the last couple of months, we have dealt with some tracking questions and issues. Throughout my career, these types of issues have persisted among agencies, media vendors, ad servers, Webmasters, and clients. One thing’s clear: the terms and procedures around tracking have not been standardized. As a result, there’s lots of confusion in the marketplace around tracking and analytics.
This two-part column will examine five common tracking and reporting issues and offer sensible approaches and explanations to deal with them. The tracking 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 have to match.
- How to compare first-click conversions versus last-click conversions.
In this column, I will dig deep into the first two items and follow up next time with the other three.
