I’ve heard some of you mention that AEBN traffic stats don’t work. I mentioned the problem to Nina (@ AEBN) and she offered to have Google Analytics tracking codes put on my theaters. I took her up on it and they’ve just gone into effect…
While I still wish the stats that Stats Remote pulled worked properly, I gotta say having Google Analytics on the theaters is pretty cool - I’ll be able to tell all sorts of things I can’t tell with regular traffic stats…
Those of you who are interested should contact your rep…
One word of warning though… The stats you get in Google Analytics can’t be directly compared to what you get from most affiliate programs. GA tracks things by original referrer. So if a person follows the link, bookmarks the page, doesn’t clear their cookies, and comes back 6 months later via the bookmark it will appear to be coming from your link. That would look like two visits in GA, but only one unique click in standard sponsor stats… To have a proper comparison between the two you need to only look at new traffic in GA - then you’ll be a lot closer to what you get from sponsors.
[Now if we could just get sponsors to give us the ability to have iFrame includes on the signup pages when our affiliate code made the sale - that would be incredible. Then we could see which traffic we send actually converts into sales and what types of sales…]