New Click Ref Report

[stu-art]

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If you use a different click ref for each of your sites, this will be reported in the stats. So you'll be able to see how much traffic is coming from each of your sites.

....Doh..as Chris just said!!

[moviedrome]

Is there anyway you could add functionality to be able to search for transactions by clickref? That would be REALLY useful!

[chrisg]

Is there anyway you could add functionality to be able to search for transactions by clickref? That would be REALLY useful!

It is functionality I would like to add to this report in the future. You can group by click ref in the commission details report.

[internet-laptop]

{keyword} needs to be added to the affiliate link clickref within the destination URL in your PPC campaign.

Hi chris,

Thanks for your reply. I might be missing something here. currently all my PPC campaign, the destination URL is pointing to my website such as my website. Do you meant putting the {keyword} in my homepage URL; such as http://www.homepage.com/?{keyword}. I don't think is quite right.

I am currently putting my AW affiliate link in my website NOT PPC campaign, as what mostly people do. I believe Google and other search engine don't really allow affiliate link to be add into their destination URL. Correct me if I am wrong. Thanks

[chrisg]

Hi chris,

Thanks for your reply. I might be missing something here. currently all my PPC campaign, the destination URL is pointing to my website such as my website. Do you meant putting the {keyword} in my homepage URL; such as http://www.homepage.com/?{keyword}. I don't think is quite right.

I am currently putting my AW affiliate link in my website NOT PPC campaign, as what mostly people do. I believe Google and other search engine don't really allow affiliate link to be add into their destination URL. Correct me if I am wrong. Thanks

You can only use the {keyword} tag in the destination URL within the AdWords campaign. If direct linking to a merchant you can add it in to the clickref parameter in the affiliate link. If linking to a landing page or site you could add {keyword} to your detsination URL in the ad campaign.

You could pass the keyword to your landing page and then use PHP or another language to pass it in to the affiliate links contained within your page.

Example PPC destination URL:
http://www.homepage.com/?keyword={keyword}

[internet-laptop]

Hi,

OK, so basically this whole thread only explaining the {keyword} parameter where affiliate sending traffic directly to merchant site NOT to a landing page as what I am doing.

If now I used the {keyword} parameter in my AW affiliate links in my landing page/homepage. Would my control panel in AW account able to track the keywords?

I am currently using both Google and Yahoo. I know for Yahoo they come with standard tracking URL such as OVKEY parameter. Would they work with AW click ref?

I have a programme currently running with Webgain, in my aco**** I will be able to track the converted keywords via Yahoo in "click ref" parameter. I am not sure whether it work the same as in AW.

[chrisg]

Hi internet-laptop

Please drop me an email or PM with your details and I will give you a call to go over click ref and how it can be used. My email is chris@affiliatewindow.com

Chris

[Andrew Starr]

Is there anyway you could add functionality to be able to search for transactions by clickref? That would be REALLY useful!

You used to be able to do this, and then one day it wasn't there any more.

[confuscius]

Funny thing is I was speaking to AW a few weeks ago about whether this could be done via the API! Nice start and this is particularly useful for the SEO Shop Window users. There are several useful posts on the SW forum that deal with clickref usage.

It would be really nice if the report could be cross referenced to report no of sales attached to each clickref and timeframe and then for that to be clickable to the detail sales - just to see if the same clicks led to the same value sales.

Already some interesting things become visible - for example, cross referencing manually to one particular merchant for one particular product leaves me to wonder how overpriced their products are and why the traffic has not led to any sales given there is a high correlation between the clickref of the product clicked on and the product purchased (which you cannot see!!).

Overall, a step in the right direction but cross referencing several thousand clickrefs is a bit impractical at the moment, so looking forward to seeing this report developed further.

ADDENDUM: I have now had chance to track some clicks back to original server logs and unfortunately it seems that some scraper bots ( eg I have one from 82.80.249.144 - an Israeli bot - on one site at the moment ) when they spider the go to links in SW then these are recorded as clicks so a lot of the clicks are fake and not real visitors - I have no idea how to address this issue globally but locally I could 403 the IP.

[confuscius]

Another update - having checked a couple more sites then I find the same bot having the same effect - user agent shows as Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; (R1 1.1); .NET CLR 1.1.4322). So until we can resolve the issue of false clicks the reports are somewhat screwed! Clearly these false clicks will affect the AWIN index, etc for a number of merchants!

How should this issue be dealt with? At our end or AW end?

Anyone else able to pin down any other false clicks?

BTW it would be really nice if the edit report part included the ability to select ALL merchants to change results per page. Also from the link report screen instead of the merchant link linking to the merchant details page it would be nice if this link took you to the clickref analysis for that merchant. To be able to get to all clicks from one source site then this could be achieved via a sort of regex pattern match filter option on the clickref field so if clickref includes the source site say 'SITE1' then being able to filter all 'SITE1' records would be brilliant or does AW have the ability to include a further column of ' Referrer Site' say?

[chrisg]

Thank you all for your thoughts on what extra functionality the report should have. We will be improving the report and will try and get as much functionality in to it as possible.

confuscius - Affiliate Window filters out the clicks and impressions from common search engine spiders and bots as well as many other automated spiders. You could do a 403 on the IP and stop this traffic. AWin Index does count these clicks but not filtering them out for all does ensure an even playing field. We do add spiders to our blocked list when we come across ones which are driving significant false traffic.

[Qui Gon Jinn]

I haven't read htrough the whole thread but at first glance it would be nice to have additional columns showing the commission that click ref has generated for pending, confirmed, reversed & total. Then it would really serve a useful purpose.