I had a click report from My Deco sent to me by a client on Friday, asking for my comments. MyDeco is a comparison shopping engine in the home interiors vertical market; they work on a combination of affiliate comission (CPA) and pay per click (CPC) to generate their revenue, so retailers pay for clicks through to their website and a percentage commission if a sale is made.
This particular client has been very disappointed by MyDeco’s performance, with no sales being generated and a very small number of visitor referrals. So it was something of a surprise to see the click report claiming hundreds of visits with a resultant bill of three figures, when Google Analytics reported visits barely into double figures from MyDeco in the same period.
The accompanying email from MyDeco claimed “We have excluded Google, Yahoo and other known bots in line with industry standards, as well as repeat/multiple clicks from the same IP (double clicks)… We would also like to point out that some CPC retailers have experienced differences between their Google analytics reports and the volume of clicks in the attached reports. This is due to the inherent limitations of Google analytics software, to identify trends rather than 100% accurate datasets.” Well, I think Google might have something to say about that, but it becomes pretty clear why they’re making excuses when you open the report.
Inherent “limitations” of Analytics accetped, do you really think that it is so limited that it would fail to report 97% of all visitors from MyDeco!? Seriously, you think Analytics is likely to be that wrong? I can’t see it.
But then we come to the real crux of the matter. The report provided, by default, opens to show clicks listed per day for the period. If you expand each day, it tells you the time of each click and the product that was clicked on. I found several instances where there were five clicks from the same product within a minute of each other. The charge was 36p per click every time. What do you think the chances of five different people clicking on exactly the same product within the space of a minute are, taking into account that we are talking about a three month period with less than 300 clicks in total? They must be the same person each time. So what happened to excluding “repeat/multiple clicks from the same IP”?
This kind of rubbish is disgraceful and gives CPC a bad name. How many retailers would just open the report, look at the number of clicks and pay the invoice? If you’re a MyDeco retailer, I urge you to examine your click reports in detail and see if it tallies with your Analytics and log files. In this case, the discrepancy is huge and the cause is quite clear – complete failure of the MyDeco click cleaning software to do its job, very much in MyDeco’s favour.
Hi Ian,
I’m the mydeco PR manager, and I just wanted to drop you a quick line to say that we have seen your post and are concerned about the points you’ve made. I am going to meet with our SEO team and retail manager and get back to you with a response as soon as I can.
Kind regards,
Michelle
020 3384 1337
Thanks Michelle, appreciate you taking the time to respond. I’m not out to get anyone, I’m sure there are plenty of similar things going on elsewhere too (sadly!)
Hi Ian,
It was good to talk to you earlier. Thanks for taking the time to listen, we appreciated the opportunity to explain a little more about our business. As a new and growing business we are passionately focused on creating successful relationships with retailers. We have over 1,200 retailers aggregated through our site, with this number growing all the time as we achieve our aim of becoming the UK’s one-stop-shop for furniture and homewares shopping. We take a strong, brand building approach with all of our partner retailers and we constantly strive to help grow smaller businesses, working closely with them to achieve good results. We always aim to send qualified and targeted traffic to partner retailers, whilst leveraging their brand through our advanced meta search and the added value content sections of mydeco like our 3D room planning tools and original, authoritative editorial.
We apologize for the reporting error you picked up on and can assure you that this has now been rectified. Please do get in touch if you have any questions about mydeco in the future and we’ll be happy to talk through any concerns.
Kind regards,
Jenna Anians
No problem Jenna, I’m glad you took the time to contact me and explain things, I hope you don’t have any more issues with the click reporting software. 🙂
Ok its now 2 months on – any update on how my deco perform?
Well, we had some issues with Analytics, so I don’t have a lot of data for this particular site, but based on the small sample available, it seems to be providing the traffic that MyDeco reports to us, so it’s good that it tallies.
As for sheer numbers, it’s not too bad, although it’s a pretty small percentage of the overall visitors. Conversion rate is slightly above average, but there’s not enough data yet to say if this is a consistent trend. With the price and margin on the products being sold, I’m not yet sure if the ROI is sufficient long-term, but we need more data before making that decision. Anybody else out there care to share their MyDeco experiences?
Could you tell me if the mydeco report which the client receives includes the keywords searched to generate the traffic to their site through mydeco’s CPC?? The reason I ask is my client is running a campaign through mydeco but looking through the Google Analytic reports for keyword traffic it shows a (not set) status. I guess this is due to Google not being able to access the info as mydeco probably keep this in house for their own reporting needs! Shame they couldn’t pump this analytic data back to Google Analytics through the API.
Anyway I look forward to your reply 😉
Hi Sahus. We don’t get keyword information either – but then you don’t have to search MyDeco to pull up a product, you could browse to the product page via the navigation menu and then click the link, so there wouldn’t be a keyword to pass over.
Hi Ian, thanks for your posts, they are an interesting read.
How are you finding mydeco a year on from your previous post? Do you feel it is beneficial to your business?
Look forward to your reply 😉
Hi Rick, MyDeco is used by one of our clients, so I’m not as close to it as I might be, but it’s pretty clear from their Analytics that it isn’t doing a whole lot for them. There is the odd month when a sale is made, but it’s not consistent enough to justify the cost.