Microsoft adCenter over reporting conversions

I have long suspected that Microsoft adCenter is over reporting conversions. Here is the confirmation from my adCenter reporting:

I am guessing that the purchaser visited the ‘thank you for your purchase’ page (which contains the conversion tracking script) 5 times, for whatever reason. I can’t think of any other way this situation could occur – the conversion tracking isn’t set up to take account of multiple purchases in one transaction. How difficult would it be to only count the first visit? Google can do it.

Being cynical, perhaps the over reporting suits Microsoft? But it makes it much more difficult for me to assess the real effectiveness of keywords and ads. Another good reason to concentrate my efforts on Google Adwords instead.

8 thoughts on “Microsoft adCenter over reporting conversions”

n! Labs 8 July 2008 at 2:16 am

Andy,

I experienced the same thing in Adcenter. I had 1 click but 2 conversions..thought it was odd. Anyway, I haven’t used Adcenter in over a month and doubt I am missing anything.

Anon 9 July 2008 at 1:12 am

Wouldn’t this also happen if the person “clicked” days earlier and then “converted” today?

Andy Brice Post author9 July 2008 at 9:01 am

>Wouldn’t this also happen if the person “clicked” days earlier and then “converted” today?

I don’t see what difference that makes.

Anon 9 July 2008 at 5:01 pm

The difference it makes is that it would make it appear that you have recieved more conversions than clicks; however, by selecting a broader date range, the number of conversions would actually be less than the number of clicks as expected.

Andy Brice Post author9 July 2008 at 5:07 pm

>by selecting a broader date range

I see what you mean. But it was set to ‘Entire time’, so that doesn’t explain it.

Anon 9 July 2008 at 5:14 pm

Got it – I don’t think AdWords is immune to this either, though it may not happen as frequently.

It seems that the only way to avoid the problem is to make the confirmation page a dynamic page which expires based on a cookie setting and won’t reload the conversion script multiple times for a single client.

Chicago Internet Marketing Company 23 February 2009 at 8:49 pm

We have ran into the same problem as Andy with one of our clients. It will happen about every 3 weeks with almost a double amount of conversions from the week before.

Any updates since the original post went up?

Thank you.

Andy Brice Post author24 February 2009 at 9:05 pm

@Chicago IMC
I get so few click from MS Adcenter, compared to Google Adwords, that I don’t bother to monitor it very closely now. As long as I think the ROI is positive I will just leave it to tick over and concentrate my attention on Adwords.

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