Numbers don’t lie. Or do they. It depends on who’s counting.
When we started our email marketing business four years ago, we encountered some situations where our tracking numbers differed greatly from the numbers our client IT departments had counted.
This would leave us in the classic “he said/she said” conundrum. Who were you to believe?
That’s why we instituted the dvMail eTegrity program. We hired an independent third party to track our clients’ broadcasts, a company who had no skin in the game at all. Whether the campaign performed, or didn’t, this company would get paid just the same.
Since then, as each broadcast progresses, we get real-time campaign tracking results from our third party tracking service as well as click updates from our broadcast server. We can side-by-side them and feel confident in our numbers.
Plus, we can easily identify anti-spam bot activity and remove those clicks from our count.
Armed with redundant reports which confirm the integrity of our tracking results, we still occasionally find counting discrepancies between our two mutually-confirming reports and the Google Analytics or Hitbox reports presented by a client.
Enter analytics company Akirasoft. I’ve attached an executive summary of their report on some of the foibles of tracking software, and the reason why your tracking numbers are probably much lower than they actually are. It has to do with the primary function of your tracking software and the effect visitor cookies, javascript and flash have on your software’s ability to count visitor numbers.
Tracking issues seemingly will never go away entirely. But knowing why discrepancies may occur, at least lets you sleep better at night.