Have they started "shaving"?

[a-j]

Hey folks =)

There are two sponsors I signed with last year and I've been sending
constant traffic to the them. From April 1st both sponsors switched
their systems to NATS and since then uniques dropped massively
on both while traffic on my sites stayed the same.

Sponsor A dropped from average ~600 monthly uniques to 200 in April.
Sponsor B dropped from 200 to 40.

I know these numbers weren't great anyway but thus I am concerned about
being "shaved" even more. Talked to one of the affiliate managers on
Sponsor A and he just replied "Perhaps we count uniques in another way now....".

It is remarkable that both sponsors switched to NATS and my numbers dropped, isnt it?
So what do you think about it?

Cheers from Germany =)
aj.

[mikesinner]

Probably just the quality of your traffic dropped. Are you getting the same amount of keyword hits?

[daedal]

I've never been a lover of NATS programs because you are relying on the honesty of the sites owners, whereas CCBILL, Epoch etc the stats are tracked by a third party.

However saying that, just because your stats dropped there may be other reasons, although two sites switching to NATS and both having large drops, well not large numbers wise but large percentage wise for you, seems a bit strange.

Do you still have old links out there?, maybe it would be a good idea to change them to the new links.

[seeandsee]

Sponsor A and he just replied "Perhaps we count uniques in another way now....".

So did you ask him something more?

[fresh]

looks like they started counting 2'nd page hits now- shady way to have "nicer" statistics. That would be my guess