Find My Missing AdWords Conversions! (my white whale)

[IDASEO]

Hello! I hope someone can help shed some light on this issue for me because I have searched far and wide for answers to no avail. So, without further ado, here goes...

The destination URL's in our AdWords ads are affiliate redirects with "Google" as the Affiliate Code. Since our products are according to license, we have different price points for the same item number. We cannot get accurate earnings through AdWords. The affiliate redirect records the Google conversion in our store which gives us the ability to associate a dollar amount with conversions as well as compare the number of conversions against what is stated in the AdWords interface.

The problem is that AdWords consistently shows significantly more conversions than our store's affiliate code reflects. For example:

• AdWords Conversions for March 2013: 31
• Store Orders Showing Google Affiliate ID for March 2013: 19

So judging from those numbers it looks like 12 conversions were lost from AdWords reporting to the reporting in our online store. I have checked and double checked that our destination URL's are uniform in their formatting and have the appropriate "Google" affiliate code, so they should be recorded.

Does anyone have any insight or experience with this? Is it possible that our affiliate cookie is somehow being dropped as the user is redirected to the landing page via the destination URL? 12 conversions is a pretty significant difference and since those conversions seem to be getting lost on the way to our store, that's revenue that i'm not able to add to determine the true ROI of the effort.

Can anyone help?

[danrawk]

Do you have access to a referrer URL  field in your website's logs? or perhaps via an "orders table" in your website's database that records the referrer ?

you may be able to filter it  out orders and then by affiliate in the URL.

[IDASEO]

Thanks for the quick response! i am checking into this with the person who maintains the database for our store. I believe the answer will be yes because each store order does have a field for the referrer. I can also pull up a monthly Sales by Referrer report that lists the referrers as well as the total number of orders placed from that referrer. Some orders have very clean referrers and others have long and complicated strings originating from Google while others' referrer fields are blank. There seems to be no real consistency there.

[JasmineA]

Hey! This is really common, and something I deal with a lot.

AdWords is First-Touch Attribution based. Meaning that no matter how someone got back to your site, AdWords will still claim the conversion for itself.

So if someone browses through to your site like so:
Paid > Organic > Organic > Paid > Direct
the first paid search click is going to receive the credit for the conversion, in AdWords' eyes.

So yes, your affiliate cookie is being dropped because someone is most possibly coming back to the site through a different channel.

The best way to look at this is to check out the Multi-channel funnels in GA to see if there is a higher percentage of profits being attributed to AdWords at the first-click level.

This would be my first guess, but there are several other pieces that could be broken. I don't think it's broken, but if this theory doesn't work out, I'm happy to troubleshoot other possibilities.

[IDASEO]

Hi Jasmine,

Thanks for the good information. I have always suspected that the cookie was being dropped in some cases but that has been difficult for me to prove! Checking out Multi-Channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics has given me more confidence that that is the case but it is still not adding up exactly.

Here is something interesting. If I add up all orders with Google affiliate ID's and all orders with a long-string referrer that originates from google.com/cse , google.com/aclk  or google.com/url I get my magic number of 31 conversions which matches what AdWords has. I believe I can pull a report from our database that would populate with just these parameters.

If you have any other ideas though, I'd love to hear them!