Hi there,
Yesterday we were having some issues with the tracking of one of our affiliates. I’m not sure if it was something that was due to the fact that your site was down. Could that have been the problem? Today, the visits seem to be tracking. We are working with a company that has tracking software on our site and they show over 200 clicks to our site that we can’t account for because things were not properly tracking. Somehow today, clicks are showing.
Does the Affiliates software register an IP address for a certain amount of time or days? I remember reading somewhere that we could set this. Is that possible? Also, does the software recognize a unique user vs. an existing user? I ask this because we have an affiliate that has two affiliate accounts and she tried to test it back to back. The first test seems to have tracked and the second did not. We purchased all the way through completion of the sale and it is not showing.
Could there be a reason why an affiliate account is not working? I need to trouble shoot this.
Thank you.
Hi Jean,
Affiliates plugin works as a stand-alone program, so even if our site is down, the plugin will operate normally. Only if your site is down, will affect the plugin’s process.
At the moment the plugin stores information/statistics on visits and hits. However, i will propose these features for unique visitors and see if it can be included in a future release.
Probably you are referring to cookies timeout. This can be set under Affiliates > Settings > Referrals or for each affiliate as an attribute. The best way to test the plugin’s process would be to set the cookie timeout to 0(zero) until you finish your tests and decide which value best suites your case. This is probably the reason why you noticed normal tracking for one affiliate and no tracking for another affiliate.
Also, another reason for that could be that the affiliate not tracking, is an inoperative affiliate. Inoperative affiliates exist on the system, but can’t refer new sales/users.
For this, you should check the From and Until dates for your affiliates. The From date should be set before the current date and accordingly Until date should be set at least after the current date.
Kind regards,
George