Every so often a merchant emails us and wants to know why they are seeing sales in AvantLink that their analytics software is showing as associated with another ad campaign, eg. email, PPC.
Merchant asked: “There is a substantial discrepancy between sales reported via AvantLink vs sales reported via Google Analytics – shouldn’t they be the same?”
AvantLink answered: Google analytics (and other analytics packages) only record the last referred click, and your Affiliate cookie is valid for 90 days from any click through. So they (Google in this case) are not reporting the complete click stream that resulted in the actual sale. So as an example, just because your Google analytics says the last click came from an email campaign, that does not negate a valid Affiliate referral still in place from a previous click through within the defined 90-day window.