Some of the most frequently asked questions by newbie affiliates recently, are related to clickloss, what it is, why it’s happening and how to combat it. I tried to search the forums but couldn’t find a dedicated thread that would explain this phenomenon in great detail, so I thought why not write it myself? 🙂

FIRST OF ALL, WHAT DOES CLICK-LOSS ACTUALLY MEAN?

In affiliate marketing, we are all using funnels that we are driving the users through, in order to convert them into leads/customers. A simple funnel could look like AD→LP→Offer.

But since we are all clever affiliates, we also employ some kind of tracker, to be able to analyze the data. And a typical affiliate isn’t working with direct advertisers, but rather promotes the offers through various affiliate networks.

So a typical affiliate funnel is a bit more complicated and it usually looks like this:
AD→Tracker→LP→Tracker→AffiliateNetwork→Offer

Now, let’s say that the stats at your traffic source shows they sold you 100 hits, but you trackers shows that only 80 landed on your LP, where 40 of them clicked on the CTA, but the affiliate network only shows 30 in their stats. These click discrepancies are called the CLICKLOSS.

WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN AT ALL?

There are several reasons for this, some are natural and nothing can be done about that. But in some cases we can lower the discrepancies and in other cases, it indicates that something fishy is going on with the traffic source.

NATURAL CLICKLOSS.

1. Let’s take at the natural connectivity related clickloss first.

It has to do with how the Internet itself is setup in the first place. As you know for sure, any request that you make while surfing the web, has to go through several access points. The requests first goes to your local ISP, then it’s routed to some national provider and travels through their backbone … The more distant the physical location of the server that hosts the content you want to access is, the more points the requests have to go through.

And since the tech isn’t 100% fail-proof, problems can happen. The request can time out, it can hang for a while, there might be some problem and the request will get rerouted. To put it simple, the more access points are on the way, the higher the chance of some problem. Especially when speaking about the infrastructure in some less developed countries.

To give you an idea, I did a “tracert” command for two websites, one was google.com and the other one was a local news portal. ...

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