The flaws of tracking exchanges

Say you were coaching a basketball team. You had one guy that never scored, but the most assists on the team. Would you fire him?

That’s how I look at traffic exchanges and tracking. Or lack of. I say lack of, because how do you know which exchanges gave that click an assist?

Statistically they say someone won’t buy something the first time. It takes branding, building up trust.

Well what if one exchange is building all that branding, but another exchange happens to get the click. Are you tracking assists?

I bet you aren’t. In fact, unless you have your own specialized script I know you aren’t. That’s the flaw.

Take this scenario: You assign 1000 hits to your site on StartXchange. 200 people view it 5 times. Then you are out of credits. You also assign 1000 hits to I Love Hits. Those same people view it another 5 times, and because of the branding start to sign up.

With the current tracking, you’d probably drop StartXchange and stick with I Love Hits because that’s where the signups are coming from. Right? Even though it’s the same 200 people (in the scenario), and it took the combined 2000 hits to get all those clicks.

I think Jon was onto something. You could be so focused on the ROI that you miss the big picture: Branding. And when you forget that, it’ll only take time before your ROI across the board goes down.