I questioned today he amount of impressions tracked on my site, as Google Analytics show twice as many pages with the affiliate code viewed by visitors. I got this reply:
Besides, the showing of a page is not necessarily an impression as an impression will only be registered when a banner of our merchant is shown.
I strip the affiliate code of its image and include my own to speed up the display of the page. Does the omission of the original banner image upset the tracking of the impressions?
If they are determining the number of impressions by the number of times that banner is accessed then YES. If they are tracking it some other way then NO.
I don’t quite follow you. The idea of the affiliate link is that someone clicks on the link (be it an image, mine or theirs) and arrives at another website
Well, in fact they are not, as they don’t seem to be tracking MOST of the visits and I am trying to find out why.
I wonder also if a link that is at the very bottom of the page and that the visitor does not scroll down to, so that he actually sees it, counts as an impression
I don’t know if my interpretation is correct, but I’ve always taken it to mean
“The advertisement was seen”
Which in your case, it isn’t being seen.
For example, what if they decided that blue with arial wasn’t as effective as green and helvetica ?
Or the image of a book wasn’t as effective as an image of a tree ?
In other words, even if they didn’t make a change to improve marketability, it wouldn’t be their advertisement that was seen, but your image of what it may no longer look like.
TBH I imagine if you read the Terms carefully you may very well see something to the effect that doing what you have done could result in you not getting paid or even having your account dropped attogether.
How else would they possibly know?
If I were running a marketing campaign I’d want data to evaluate its effectiveness.
How many are seeing the ad at a particular site?
What percentage of the ads get users to click?
What percentage of those clicking go to the next step (whatever that might be)
In fact, I have just read the rules and restrictions on these mercahnts and there is nothing to stop doing what I am doing.
All they are interested in is sales providing there is no cheating.
The fact that I have some impressions tends to defeat my logic, that it is the banner download that triggers the impression tracking. Need to do some experimenting.
Try to cloak the affiliate link with an url shortner and then check their analytics… also you can try using a 3rd party analytics software like gostats to double check it.