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?

In an attempt to boost my commissions via affiliates on my eco-gadget review site EnviroGadget, I wanted to see if I could improve the number of visitors clicking through to the merchant website. I don’t get a commission for all of the products I review on EnviroGadget. However, for the products I do earn a commission, I wanted to make sure that I was getting as many people clicking through my affiliate links as possible.

Therefore I decided to run some experiments with different types of button. Just by changing the colour of a button and changing its text a little, I found a way to triple my click-through rates (CTRs)! Yep, you read that right, triple! Read on to find out how.

The Technology

I have some relatively complex code that I’ve written to handle the affiliate tracking, and it’s beyond the scope of this article to explain it in detail. However, I’ll cover the basics. My affiliate tracking code allows me to create a URL like this:

http://www.envirogadget.com/recommends/a-solar-powered-gadget/g_bn

When that URL is clicked, it redirects the user to the product page on the merchants website, dropping a cookie to ensure that if the user makes a purchase on that website, I get a commission.

The ‘a-solar-powered-gadget‘ part of the URL is the code for a particular product. The ‘recommends‘ part of the URL tells a script on EnviroGadget to redirect a user to a product page using the product code I just mentioned.

The ‘g_bn‘ part of the URL is an example of a special tag that I can use for additional tracking. So I could link to a product using the URL above using many different coloured buttons. If I used a different tag for each different button, it means I can track how many times each button can get clicked. This is what I used to test the different buttons in the experiments below.

Experiment 1 – The Hypothesis

All my affiliate buttons started off being a green Buy Now button. However, I wondered if a contrasting button colour would out-perform my green button (especially as the rest of the site is themed with green). I also wanted to test different button texts too, just too see if the wording had any effect.

Hypothesis 1:

“I expect contrasting blue buttons to outperform the more subtle orange buttons on click through rates”.

Hypothesis 2:

“I expect that the less imperative More Info buttons would outperform the stronger Buy Now buttons”.

Experiment 1 – The Results Data

Button Experiment 1 - Orange and Blue

Notes: I was told that “Shop Now” was a good button text to use, so I wanted to test that. For some reason, I didn’t use green in the first experiment. Can’t remember why!

Experiment 1 – Conclusion

From the results, it’s clear that my initial theories were completely wrong!

So the results show that the orange buttons considerably outperformed the blue buttons. The orange Shop Now button more than doubles the CTR compared to the blue button. Perhaps this has something to do with the emotive effect of colours, e.g. warm v.s. cold colours. Even still, the orange buttons are harder to see with a green background, and blue is more of a contrast to green.

The results show that More Info is a waste of time, performing the worst overall. However, Shop Now is the strongest performing text, with Buy Now being a close second.

Based on these results, I realised I needed to test some more combinations as my assumptions were very wrong.

Experiment 2 – The Hypothesis

Following on from the first experiment, I thought it would be wise to compare the performance of my existing green Buy Now button against orange buttons. I also wanted to test red against orange and green to see if it had any significant impact.

Hypothesis 3:

“I expect that the brighter red buttons will outperform the green and orange buttons, with the red Shop Now button being the best button for the highest CTR “.

Experiment 2 – The Results Data

Button Test 2 - Red, Orange and Green

Experiment 2 – Conclusion

I had clearly learnt something from the first experiment, and my theory was spot on correct in the second experiment. However, the range of values I obtained was very interesting.

The results showed that using a red Shop Now button (21% of clicks), rather than a green Buy Now button (7% of clicks), there’s a 3-fold increase in clicks through to the merchant website!

In general, red outperforms orange and green. The Buy Now and Shop Now are strong call-to-actions, which resulted in a high CTR compared to Buy This. I’ve not been able to come up with a reasonable explanation for the poor performance of the Buy This button text.

Overall Conclusion

From running these experiments, I learnt 3 things. These 3 lessons are:

• Check your assumptions – I was making incorrect assumptions, so testing my assumptions really paid off. I spotted my mistakes.
• Experiment and track everything – When you do test something, collect as much data as possible so you can analyse it.
• No-one will do it for you – I had to run my own experiments to learn my own lessons. Don’t rely on my data either, test your sites yourself too!

I hope you enjoyed the article and that it motivated you to run your own tests. If you like the pretty graphs, please leave a nice comment, as they took me ages to create!

Update – 30th Sept 2009

John Andrews wrote a great complement to this article on Always Be Link Building. John quite rightly emphasises the point that button colours, and therefore their respective click-through rates, are very specific to a website and its design. So just to re-iterate, test different button combinations yourself, don’t rely on my data alone!