Thread: Are there any sponsors who show unique hits correctly?

Short answer, no.

Regardless, the amount of hits your sponsor shows you is more often than not highly irrelevant. Most of them also use "creative" display of stats, in order to make ratios look better. The most relevant metric you could have is money earned per click SENT OUT from your site to the sponsor. Which is something that's hard as fuck to gauge, without having access to both the stats on your end and those on the sponsor's end.

Like Damage said. What counts is sales (or $ earned) per visitor sent. The only way to know the number of visitors sent is to track it on your end, which most of us don't do. You can usually get an idea of whether the sponsor is performing up to your expectations based on history and experience with other sponsors over the years.

Sponsors report hits so many different ways, it is impossible to find any consistency amongst them. Some count raw hits to first page. Some count unique hits to first page. Some count unique hits to second or even third page of a tour. Some only count hits to the join page, etc.

No matter how the sponsor counts the hits, it may not match your clicks out for various reasons. Examples: The surfer clicks the link but the tour does not load immediately so they hit the back button or close the window. The surfer clicks but has a cookie set previously from another affiliate (depending on how the sponsor cookie is set up). Surfer clicks and tour loads so slowly that the visit does not get tracked before the surfer hits the back button or closes the window, etc.

I tend to prefer to measure my earning performance in $ earned per unique visitor per day to my site, without regard for what they click on or how I derived the income.These days the income could come from pay site sales, dating sales, cam site sales, selling mobile traffic via redirect, selling on click pop-unders, etc. If I have a site that has 10,000 unique visitors per day and I earn $30.00 per day = $0.003 per unique visitor. I generally look at it network wide vs. individual site earnings, but the same way. Earning per unique visitor (EPU).