shopping.com clicks part III – ROI tracker

Based on the sage advice from our account rep, we decided to implement the ROI tracker.  If anything, it would be interesting to see the data they display.  Of course, we haven’t forgotten about our original mission of overbilled clicks.

So, the ROI tracker consolidates some info that is pretty helpful.  It shows the clicks by product, conversion and your cost per order.  I could have already gotten that info already, but it was nice to have shopping.com make that available.  The info that was really interesting, that I couldn’t get was the sitewide stuff.  Under the competitive Analysis tab of the Reporting, there was a column for ‘Sitewide Clicks’ and ‘Your Clicks’.  That is useful because it lets me know where I stand with my products vs competitors.  Based on our Amazon metrics, I know that we complete with merchants on about half our skus, so based on where we want to be in bidding, I may get 50-75% of the sitewide clicks.  If we bid higher, we’d probably get a higher %, if we bid lower, then we’d probably just get clicks on the 50% of products where we have no competitors.

In optimizing our account, we decided to cap our spending at $500 per analysis segment.  Once we hit $500, our account shuts down and we are able to have a clear closing period for our analysis.  Also, when we start it up, we can monitor how fast traffic comes back to those urls.  So, for our $500 spend in Nov, we got 575 clicks.  But, the sitewide click count was 379!  How can we possibly be charged for 575 clicks if the shopping.com network only generated 379 clicks for those skus?  Our weblogs recorded 318 clicks during the period, which is definitely closer to the sitewide number than the ‘Your Clicks’ number.

So, of course, I contact shopping.com to “understand” these numbers better.  It turns out that there is a known bug.  I agree, however, shopping.com thinks that the bug is with the sitewide clicks number; but I think the bug is with the Your Clicks number.  Of course, shopping.com doesn’t want to lower the Your Clicks stat because that’s how they get paid.  Here’s the comment direct from shopping.com:

“With regards to the ”your clicks” and ”sitewide clicks” discrepancy this is a ”known bug.”  The sitewide click column is not being captured accuratly and is only intended for a directional purposes.  The number of clicks you are being charged are the “your clicks” column.”

I figured that out, but I wasn’t going to let it slide this time.  Here’s their follow up:

“Our system and algorithum counts clicks differently from your internal tool and it might be not attributing clicks to the entire Shopping.com Network.  The bug is on the actual number being calculated for the column “sitewide clicks”.  We currently do not have an ETA as to when this will be fixed, however we are hoping to have it resolved soon. 

I understand where you’re coming from however you always have the option to pause your campaign within the Merchant Account Center.  I have informed my colleague to reach out to you once the shoe category is enabled for the Rev Share Program (cart) as I feel this might be a better opportunity for you.”

So, it was suggested that we stop using shopping.com until the CPA program is live in my category.  Maybe sometime in late 2008.  However, I am using basic weblog info to record clicks.  Afterall, the internet has been around long enough to be able to record clicks to a webserver correctly.  If shopping.com was really interested in solving this issue, they would have shared the ip and click info for MY ACCOUNT only with me so I could see what was happening.  I have no choice but to think that there is massive overbilling for fictitious or fraudulent clicks and it will continue to go on until they get sued or enough merchants leave the platform.

So, in conjunction with my new blog, I kicked off a new test of shopping.com.  We had our account turned off for most of December.  I must be nuts to shut off one of the top sites during the holiday, but the traffic was just that bad.  I turned the account back on January 1.  I have also been recording our web traffic each day.  I plan to post a running log count for each day of January to see how the traffic is shaping up. 

I am curious if I’m the only one who has had this experience, or are there other merchants that have seen this.