Using WCM to serve your campaign or as double tracking tool, you may experience discrepancies between the WCM reporting and statistics from another tool (DSP, adserver…). Here as the main reason why.
Trafficking error
The simplest case where you will notice discrepancies is simply a human error when trafficking the campaign, sometimes just becaure a copy paste hasn’t work correctly. The first step after noticing an issue, is to check if all tags are correctly implemented :
- Is the WCM redirect placed in the correct DSP placement ?
- Is the 3rd party tag place in the placement or creative in WCM the correct one ?
- Etc.
Natural discrepancies
In some cases, there is nothing to be done about that, simply because of the order or calls.
Let’s take for example a WCM redirect with a 3rd party pixel. Usually, volumes are going to be higher in WCM than the 3rd party tool. This is simply because the WCM redirect will be called this in the webpage, meaning WCM will count the hit anyway. But sometimes, the user quits the page before the 3rd party pixel launched : this is especially the case for slow internet connection users. The launch of the pixel can also be broken due to a specificity of the webpage that would block it or, simply, sometime just a bug on the browser.
This scenario is reversed when WCM is the 3rd party tool and not the adserving tool : in this case, we are the 3rd party pixel and we usually will count less hits than the main adserver.
The way each tool counts
Another reason is simply how each tool has been developed. Each tool has it’s own criteria to avoid counting twice the same user, for example. This means that you will usually have discrepancies simply because choices made by tools are not the same.
For WCM :
- For impression : every impression is counted. If one user makes the same impression multiple times, it will be counted for all of those hits.
- For clicks : a click from a user is counted only once in a 5 seconds time range. Meaning if you click twice within 5 seconds, only one click will be counted by WCM. However if you click again after 5 seconds, then the second click will be counted.
We also have anti-bots filter which are regularly updated, but each tool has its own : a hit counted as bot in one tool could be seen as a legit hit in another tool.
What if it is still too big ?
Weborama will not investigate discrepancies under 20%, as they are commun and usually explained with cases we saw above. However, if they are greater than 20% and you have checked everything, please contact your local support so they can investigate. Please make sure you campaign is still live, as we will not be able to investigate a suspended or ended campaign. Also, we need a minimum of impressions to investigate. Small campaigns (less than 1000 impressions) will not be investigated.
Keep in mind that the precise reason for discrepancies is rarely discovered nor are they resolved.
If you contact us, please give us as many information as possible :
- Account ID, project, campaign, insertion
- Report from WCM and the other tool on the same time range with the same dimensions and metrics, with a day-by-day view
- An URL to a live preview of the advertisement, with all actors included, or an URL to a page where the placement is.
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