Stats are lying to me

DomboCom

DomboCom

New member
Jun 4, 2009
381
8
0
I was testing a campaign a couple weeks ago that didn't turn out so well, so I thought. The day I ran this, I had 11,500 clicks and 6 conversions. I paused it and moved on. I was only paying .02/click, so not that big of a loss.

Today I went to take another look at the stats to see where things went wrong, and I now see this, which would take a losing campaign to quite profitable.

a9pb12.jpg



Network stats don't reflect these numbers though. They're still showing 6 conversions. So I figured some prick was hitting my tracking pixel to mess with my stats, but that's not the case. T202 conversions match up to Real Clicks, all from different ips that come from different locations.

mjs9bl.jpg



Can anyone help me understand how this could happen? I realize it could be that the visitors completed the action after my cookie expired, but nearly 100% of them?

Is it possible that I someone hacked my T202 and installed some sort of script to hijack my leads or something? I'm at a total loss, but feel like there's some hope with making this campaign work.
 


You're right mate. Someone is definitely messing with your prosper url. They could simply add subids to your tracking's postback url.

Code: 
[URL="http://xxxxxxx.com/tracking202/static/gpb.php?amount=&subid="]http://tracking.com/tracking202/static/gpb.php?amount=&subid=[/URL]
You could delete or rename gpb.php to make sure.
 
would make sense for clicks redmonkey but how could that make leads come through on his side, meaning the pixel fired on the thank you page?
 
kaveman said:
would make sense for clicks redmonkey but how could that make leads come through on his side, meaning the pixel fired on the thank you page?
Click to expand...

You can visit the tracking link in a browser and it'll fire the pixel as a conversion. It doesn't necessarily have to come from the thank you page.

But if someone were doing this, how would they know the subids to use, and why would they waste their time? I don't update subids manually, so its not user error.

iliketurtles said:
pixel placed on the wrong page?
Click to expand...
Could be, but the my T202 stats were in line with the network stats the day of. But now that I'm looking at historical data, they're showing way more conversions. The pixel was placed on the network's self-serve interface, so I don't think this is the case.
 
First off, I don't think you can get that kind of conversion rate on PPV or any other cheap traffic sources. It's insane, unless you're tracking the final step/after presell.

Secondly, If it were true that someone is messing with your p202, they could've gotten the subid from the link from network to offer. For Example:

HTML: 
http://www.tracking.com/tracking202/redirect/cl2.php?q=http://x.azjmp.com/3lefnM?sub=17714175

In this case, 17714175 is your latest click/subid. You could figure out the rest.

As for why they're doing it? Who knows.
 
fucking up p202 data this way is as simply as:
<?
for ($i = 0; $i < 10000000; $i++)
file_get_contents("http://tracking.com/tracking202/static/gpb.php?amount=&subid=$i");
?>
 
Um if leads correspond to the proper IPs then no one is messing with you. I'm guessing that the network forgot to place their own pixel on the advertisers thank you page. Talk to your network
 
flysarescary said:
Um if leads correspond to the proper IPs then no one is messing with you. I'm guessing that the network forgot to place their own pixel on the advertisers thank you page. Talk to your network
Click to expand...

Prosper doesn't track the IP of a hit on the postback URL... just the SubID. So the same IP could hit his postback URL with multiple subs and they would all show up as conversions from different IP's. I have no clue why someone would waste their time doing this though...
 
Jesus, I need some sleep. I just realized I am doing it to myself.

I have 2 separate P202 installs and a couple weeks ago cleared out both databases.

I have the pixels for both installs placed in AZs universal pingback, which is a network pixel, rather than placing it on the individual offer. So its updating subids on both installs, regardless of the offer. Even though this particular offer above is running through another network, pixels are still being updated from an AZ offer I'm running on my other P202 install.

I guess this never effected me before because subids on each install were so far apart from each other. But now looking back at week old stats is messing everything up since I purged the data.

Can I get a hurr-durr.
 
lol sucks that your campaign epic failed

lol stupid that prosper doesnt track cookie IPs, you should be able to designate if the postback is a postback (and valid IPs) or if its a cookie and should correspond to the original visitors IP

custom tracking ftw (not really, a lot of effort)
 
Use global pixel and don't use global postback. Delete or rename gpb.php and pb.php in tracking202/static/. The postback script is stupid. Anyone can mess with it.
 
DirSP said:
Use global pixel and don't use global postback. Delete or rename gpb.php and pb.php in tracking202/static/. The postback script is stupid. Anyone can mess with it.
Click to expand...

Cool, I thought the postback was supposed to be more accurate. So you're saying to use pixel tracking instead and disable postback to solve this? That's easy enough.
 
DomboCom said:
Cool, I thought the postback was supposed to be more accurate. So you're saying to use pixel tracking instead and disable postback to solve this? That's easy enough.
Click to expand...

The postback script does not have the ip matching code like the pixel script. I don't use prosper but I looked into their tracking script and that seems to be the case. The pixel tracking is quite accurate, around 90% - 95%.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DomboCom
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back