A guide to Smarter Tracking Techniques for Affiliates

Regardless of what website you have, are you tracking your visitors? The usual answer I get to that question, is “no”. However, if you’re not tracking your visitors, you should be. If you don’t know where to start, use Google Analytics because it’s effective and free.

The aim this article is to get you using some slightly more advanced visitor tracking enabled on your website. I’m writing the article from the perspective of an affiliate marketeer, however this Google Analytics advice can be applied to any website, such as landing pages, online shops, blogs, and so much more.

Affiliate Marketing – Very Quick Intro

Affiliates are people who advertise products and services that you can buy from a third-party merchant. In return for a sale, affiliates earn a commission from that merchant. To reach a larger audience and to save merchants hassle, affiliate networks look after the tracking and payments from merchants to affiliates.

Affiliate Link Tracking Codes

Typically as an affiliate, you create a direct link to a product or service page (called a deep link) that you encourage your visitors to click. You typically generate these deep links using the affiliate network’s deep link generator too.

As part of that deep link, you can include a reference. For example, a deep link on the Webgains network looks a bit like this (programme and affiliate IDs have been changed to protect the innocent!):

http://track.webgains.com/click.html?wgcampaignid=5678&wgprogramid=1234&clickref=my-useful-reference&wgtarget=http://www.mytargeturl.com/product.html

And a deep link via on the AffiliateWindow network looks like this:

http://www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=123&awinaffid=456789&clickref=my-useful-reference&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mytargeturl.com%2Fproduct.html

I use a different reference for each product, and therefore affiliate link that I have to the merchant. Here are a few examples.

• Product A – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=1&clickref=product-a
• Product B – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=2&clickref=product-b
• Product C – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=3&clickref=product-c

When you get a commission, that click reference shows up next to the commission that you’ve made (in the reports generated by the affiliate network). For example, here’s a small slice of my earnings via Webgains:

Webgains Transaction Report (click to enlarge)

In the diagram above, you can see the date of the transaction, the merchant, the commission and the click reference. That means I know exactly which product and link is generating a commission for me.

What’s the key benefit? I can determine which products make me money, and therefore spend more time on those product pages to earn even more! You basically get extremely valuable information about the products that either do or do not earn you money.

However, that’s only half the story. What about tracking what buttons/links/images your visitors are clicking on? Don’t forget, only a small number of visitors to your site will actually purchase something from your merchant.

We also want to know how successful we are at sending visitors to your merchant. That’s where we use Events in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Events

Google has a very comprehensive guide to events, so I won’t repeat it here. Essentially it’s an extra bit of javascript code that you add on to your outgoing links that allows you to track some information when a visitor clicks on that link.

This is ripped straight out of the Google’s Event Tracking Guide:

pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value);

• category (required) – The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.
• action (required) – A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
• label (optional) – An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.
• value (optional) – An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.

This is how I suggest that you use it:

<a href="#" onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Affiliate', 'Click', 'The Product Name');">Shop Now button, etc</a>

This means we group all outgoing clicks to affiliates under the category ‘Affiliate‘, and we call the action a ‘Click‘, and we label each link for each affiliate with ‘The Product Name‘. I’ve ignored the value parameter because we don’t need it. You’ll probably be using big red Shop Now buttons rather than a text link too.

Assuming that tracking code exists on all links that go out to your merchants, that means we’re tracking all clicks by your visitors to your merchants. We are also tracking exactly what link they are clicking, i.e. what product is causing them to visit the merchant.

Why bother? Well, we need a screenshot.

Event Tracking Labels (click to enlarge)

This is a summary of labels from one of my websites, namely my Spy Gadgets mini site (Content > Event Tracking > Labels in Google Analtyics). The chart shows the number of clicks per day on one of my affiliate links. The table below the chart shows the most popular products, i.e. those which received the most clicks out to the merchant.

What’s the key benefit? You discover which products encourage clicks to the merchant. That information can then be used to work out where you should focus your attention with the view of getting further clicks to the merchant (and hopefully a sale too!).

Conclusion

I’ve shown you simple ways to track what visitors click on, and what products/links actually generate the commission. That information will help you avoid speculation and actually focus on products/links that work for you. You also get data that allows you to measure the changes that you make to see if they’re an improvement.

Those of you who are experts on Google Analytics will notice that I am just scratching the surface. That’s intentional. I don’t want to give you all of my juicy tricks do I?