Why does the Salesforce Audience Studio click tracker record a much higher number of clicks than my adserver?
Audience Studio records and tracks all client click behaviour. This includes every single click, even if these occur within a few milliseconds of one another (think double clicking a creative instead of a single click). The emphasis is on all because unlike ad servers, Audience Studio does not filter any clicks. This is why Audience studio will usually have a higher click count than what you will generally see on your ad server.
Most Ad Servers filter out some of the clicks before they display it in their UIs. This is done to protect their clients from potential click fraud since every click usually comes at a certain cost. For example if the same visitor, with the same recorded IP addresses registers a double click on a creative, the double click would be filtered out and just one click recorded:
Actual recorded click data:
Tuesday, January 05, 2020 7:40:52.506 AM
Tuesday, January 05, 2020 7:40:52.552 AM
Displayed results after filtering:
Tuesday, January 05, 2020 7:40:52.506 AM
Audience studio on the other hand does not filter any click data since the purpose here is to record user behaviour and their is no cost tied to each user click. This is why in most cases Audience Studio will show higher number of recorded clicks than what you will see on an ad server.
Are there other reasons that may lead to click data discrepancy?
Yes there are. The following is a list of some of the most common scenarios we have seen lead to click data discrepancies:
- The tracker was implemented/removed after the start of the campaign - In this scenario the campaign may have started but the click tracker was not implemented until a later stage when it was realized the tracker was not implemented. The reverse can also happen where midway or near the end of a campaign the click tracker gets removed before the actual campaign is over.
- Multiple agencies running the same trackers - When two different parties implement the same tracker with the same config ID for multiple campaigns, all the data collected from the different campaigns will inflate the numbers leading to discrepancies.
- UTM parameters causing duplication - Sometimes the click tracker is implemented along with the UTM parameters, this will lead to tracking twice as many clicks for a campaign. The reason this happens is because the UTM parameters will track one click and the click tracker another.
Please ensure you have gone through the above list to narrow down the causes that may have contributed to discrepancies in any of your campaigns. If you still need help in identifying the possible causes for your click discrepancies please reach out to the Audience Studio support team for assistance.
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