What do you think about NATS ?
 

I was taking an off day today (no marketing day) and going over my stats when I noticed something rather strange.

I use a link tracking system for my outgoing hits. Upon comparing the hits listed by the NATS in the stats area of various sponsors and the clicks according to my own program, I noticed huge discrepancies, on occassions as much as 30%.
Similar difference is also with CCbill sponsors though it is 1-2% at the most.

As it is, this NATS thing basically renders my landing pages useless, because there is no Direct to Join option... and now this..

What are your experiences with NATS? Am I the only one or are there others who have noticed similar problems?

A follow up... these discrepancies seem only to come from some sponsors... others seem to report stats more or less accurately (3-4% difference, which I guess is normal). Damn, now I have to recheck all my codes to see if I didn't make an error.

hi,

would you mind telling which sponsors show huge discrepancies? Or, if you don't want to tell, could you at least tell which DON'T :-)

Until I am sure of my links, I will not name the sponsors... the ones that seem accurate are Reality Cash, Brain Cash, Occash, Sapphic Cash... of course the list is not complete... I am still working on it.

could you maybe pm me about the ones you are not sure about? we could compare...

I think NATS is a great backend that offers a lot of features. However, I'm very conerned about the claims of "Impossible To Shave". Either they don't understand or they think we're stupid.

As an affiliate, I'd trust a program running NATS over a program running MPA4, purely based on NATS promoting themselves as unshavable... and the type of program owner that would be attracted to use it 'despite' that feature.

I'd be interested to know if/why some NATS sponsors don't show accurate click counts though. (any chance some programs have a way to count 2nd page uniques with NATS?)

Low click counts may not necesarily mean shaved signups too.

NATS so far has not impressed me anywhere near as much as the hype would suggest. I have not actively promoted a program that uses NATS and gotten good results - so there is nothing more I can put up on this one.

Alex

I've heard a few people say this.. do you (or anybody that thinks the same) have a theory on why this might be?

Not arguing it isn't true... I just can't think of a logical reason how the affiliate managment software could affect the signup ratio that much.

The default in NATS is to count 1st page hits, at least that's what they said. But it can be changed to count 2nd page, there are a couple that do that. That could be the reason why are you seeing such a big difference.

I'm just curious.

Why are people so interested in having sponsors actually count the clicks? Shouldn't you be counting the actual numbers to your advertising and counting the dollars from the sponsor?

Aren't those the 2 numbers that really matter?

SirMoby, for me it is a question of perceived honesty. If a sponsor can't count clicks (which is a pretty simple process, when you think about it) then how can I be sure they are going to do a good job counting the money?

As an example, one sponsor (well known sites) was counting less than 10% of the traffic I was sending them. I have no idea how they are counting clicks, but I know how many banner clicks I was getting to them (over a 10 day sample period) and I know how many clicks they reported in the same period. They lost my faith in their ability to count, so I am NOT intersted in sending them any more traffic.

Alex

I like NATS. One sponsor I promote recently changed from ccbill to NATS and the number of clicks are the same. No discrepancies.

NATS is good but its a bit overrated compared to MPA and such

There are differences for sure, I didn't mix up the link codes. The next job is to write to these sponsors and see if they are not actually counting second page clicks (in which case the difference should be more, based on my previous experience). Once I hear from them, then I'll share the list.

If someone from NATS is reading this, maybe they should have a system to link directly to the join pages anyway. I have always been more successful using my own landing pages rather than tours from the sponsors (why the hell do they make a hash of their tours? I have actually seen some excellent sites convert at 1:1500 after preselling just because they idiotically put a bad looking model on their first tour page!)

I agree with Alex here. The minimum is to be able to count the actual number of clicks sent. I know there are actually some sponsors that only provide number of sales made, but that is just not correct. How do you know which ad made a sale and which ad failed? Specially when you have multiple ads running in tandem for the same sponsor.
And as Alex said, if they don't even report the number of clicks accurately, how the hell do we know that they report the number of sales accurately?

OMG terrible NATS flaw, see your sponsor's real ratio LOL
 

after this I don't trust NATS anymore:

Log in to your sponsor NATS system and then paste this path:

/admin_stats_referrers.php

What is it?

I only get redirected to members.php

So do I.

Which sponsor did that work on? The ones I tried seem to redirect to members.php too.

oops, probably they have already fixed it

Now I see what it's all about. DAMN, I knew I should never have gone to sleep :D

I'll give you a call and wake you up next time :D

you guys missed all the fun |pimpin

Opti, one of the reasons that people are seeing differences in stats and bad ratios is the fact that NATS tracks only with cookies. How to check this? A simple PHP script can prove this.This will track 100 unique hits in your account. If you try this on MPA, it won't work, because it tracks with both cookies and database.

-- Andrew

that would track 100 raw & 1 unique.

Are you sure?

hey,

could you tell sme (i don't know anything about scripting and so) if this is good or bad :-)

100 hits to a url from the same IP address = 100 RAW = 1 UNIQUE

100 hits to a url from 100 different IP addresses = 100 RAW = 100 UNIQUE

There are three real ways to do tracking:

Cookie
Hash
URL Munging

Tracking by cookie is easy to spot -- tell your browser to notify you of any cookies set and when you click your link you'll see the cookie.

Tracking by hash is usually used as a backup. This is sometimes an IP only or IP/UserAgent hash that is used to identify the sending webmaster. The trick here is that on some 3rd party systems, your hash can get quite muddied by the fact that a user going through one of AOL's edge proxy servers would have the same IP and possibly the same UserAgent as someone else that was sent. I don't know the mechanics of how CCBill does this, but, they do employ a hash as a secondary validation.

URL Munging -- this is pretty easy to see when the url that the surfer sees either has query strings or prestates that follow the surfer along. Provides for an ugly url, but, unless a surfer dissects the url, the tracking will follow through.

Obviously using all three is preferred. #3 requires some work on the webmaster's part to make a tour that passes the info along. #2 requires some database work and #1 is pretty easy to implement without any code changes to the sponsor's tour.

lame

Well if the surfer's browser does not support cookies or they're turned off - you lose the sale - now you tell me, is it good or bad?

The wm ID is still in the query string and follow through on all the pages = you will still get a sale.

Unless the surfer decides to go to the index page, where it's cookie will be rewritten with the default account ID for the site. But you will get bookmark sales ;) which is good.

This is not the proper way to track, because you may see more unique hits (surfers with no cookies), that are actually raw hits. That's where stats difference may occur and is not a reason that would affect your sales too much.

I bet their reason was to increase the stability of the system and not do a database check, which can be prevented from just looking at the cookie (if it exists, no check is needed).

:D

The default is the opposite. So far I've only seen one company that changes it to their own ID on the index page (the company that owns that other big board).

ahahahaha... I thoiught it was static :D

Actually this is possible, however a bit tricky, but this might help you:

Is it possible for an affiliate to generate or create a link that goes to the join page directly?
For an affiliate no, not really. You've got 3 choices. You can provide them with the default join form links that are displayed on your Site Admin page but replace the with thier NATS code. Another option is they can follow thier link codes to the join form and grab the join form path from the browser. One last option is to set up a tour that leads directly to the join and have them link to that tour.

Nats for program management is pretty damn comprehensive. I can tell you getting it set up can be difficult and time consuming.

They need to explore working with 3rd party integrators in the near future to insure success.

If you dont have someone competant that is dedicated to this project it could linger on for the better part of 7-10 months. Believe me... I know firsthand.

What is it they say at the Zoo? See sig?

haha.