Friday, November 21, 2008

Online Customer Acquisition - Session ID vs Cookie Tracking

The following diagrams illustrate the difference between Session ID & Cookie based tracking

Session based tracking




Cookie based tracking




Most of the advertisers in India use Session based tracking to track performance. This is like evaluating a TV ad by correlating sales within 5 minutes of airing the Ad!! The effect of this tracking is that the Advertiser will allocate the Action /Sale to the LAST referrer. So say if a user sees a banner Ad for a job portal (for discussion sake let us say it is TimesJobs) on monday clicks on it and decides he will fill in the resume over the weekend since there is a lot of information to be provided which will take time. Let us say over the weekend he doesnt remember the exact spelling of the job portal and he goes to Google and types Jobs at Times and finds the link and then clicks and goes on to filling the resume. In this case is it fair to give ALL credit to Google?

See this in context of let us say a Bank that generates leads of credit cards. Online application forms of banks for Credit cards run in 4-5 pages and has information like PAN number etc. Lot of these details may not readily be available with the user or the user may just want to bookmark the page and come back to it later. Should the advertiser not recognise the role of the other referrers in the user journey before buying? It is a pity that Advertisers in India are not making use of wealth of information of a user journey before he finally buys from their site.

Fortunately Internet technology allows us to track all this, however, Advertisers must be willing to make use of superior technologies and must be willing to change their mid sets else they will never be able to fully optimise their online customer acquisition activities.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Anurag,

How ad networks help publishers for the problem mentioned in your article? Because this is a general problem for publishers in case of affliate programs.

Thanks,
Rajeev
http://www.brandsindiaonline.com

Anonymous said...

Hi Anurag,

Nice informative posts. I was looking for market size of internet in India and landed up on your 2006 post. Can you pls help me with some latest estimates of numbers on users/revenues? Would be greatful if you could write me at vipin.sharda@gmail.com

Thanks.

Anonymous said...

We liked the content and the article. Worth the time

Pankaj said...

Hi Anurag,

Their is one more problem for small publisher/affiliates in India. We earn some penny after working very hard to bring visitors to our site. But they never get payment from the affiliate site.

Just to verify the truth, check my account (Affiliate Company ID: 21376) in your company DgmPro-India. It is just about Rs.3000 which I never got paid.

I have sent signed and scanned copy of PAN card and all other details each time I've been asked.

If you need any more then please let me know.

Thanks.

Pankaj Kumar Roy

SEO Delhi said...

We run quite a few affiliate programs and I never knew about this aspect before reading your post. This means we affiliate are paid much less as compared to what we should be paid.

I also often feel that affiliate networks in India deliberately delete sales of the affiliates so they can charge the commission for those sales from the merchants but don't have to pay to the affiliates.