Affiliate tracking of Return On Investment, ROI

[richardburridge]

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In need of some help.

I am starting a website that displays a number of different affiliate programs and I need some help with the tracking. I want to advertise the website using PPC and other methods like my newsletter, but as everyone should know, I need a way of tracking exactly which source of traffic is earning me money and how much.

My plan so far is to send users to a different landing page/sub domain depending on where they have come from, eg. If I have sent them to the website from my newsletter then the link would be www.my-domain-name.co.uk/newsletter1/ , where they would then get redirected to the homepage. I then want someway of changing the outbound links to the affiliate website so that I know which landing page/sub domain the user has come from. Eg if the user came to the website from www.my-domain-name.co.uk/newsletter1/, then I would want the “newsletter1” part to be added to the outbound link to the affiliate website so that it shows in the affiliate report.

Know how many people have clicked the link and where they came from is not enough as I need to now if they have actually earned me any money.

Hopefully you understand what I mean.

Ideas so far have been to some how carry the landing page code through all of the website links and have some script on the exit page that takes that code and puts it into the correct place in the exit url link.

Maybe using cookies but have never used these and don’t know how it would work.

If you have any ideas on how I can do this or you know of any software that might do it then please leave a post and let me know.

Thanks, Richard

[Crazy Biker]

If you get a Google Analytics account you can setup tracking in each url and get Google to track them.

[nim-b]

I think if you implement Google Analytics you won't even need to have seperate urls. You can setup various different 'goals' for your traffic (for example, for retailers the goal is normally a sale, in your case it could be clicking on an affiliate advert). It will also tell you traffic sources (right down to Adwords keywords for Google), and you can see how this traffic converts into particular goals.

So you can look at all the traffic coming from a source, and see what proportion of this traffic clicked on an advert. Then, knowing the income generated from that ad, you can see which traffic source is most profitable.

Hope that makes sense. Not sure how easy it is to setup the goals in Analytics- perhaps someone else knows that.

Cheers
Naomi

[Crazy Biker]

If you wanted to track/test a particular item, i.e two banners on the same page you could set-up to track with the following:

The first link is a text link:

http://www.example.com/buy_page?utm_source=newsletter
&utm_medium=email&utm_content=buytext

The second link is a hyperlinked image:

http://www.example.co.uk/buy_page?utm_source=newsletter
&utm_medium=email&utm_content=buypict



This will allow you to track exactly what you want and allow for different elements on the same page/site or different pages/site to be compared to see what converts better for your site.

This information can be found on the Google Analytics support pages.

As Naomi has also pointed out, there is so much that Google Analytics tracks without custom created links if you just wanted overall results. For FREE you can't beat GA for what it does.

Lee

[D-Mac]

It's pretty starightforward to track which referrers lead to a conversion, including keywords, over the following path:
Traffic Source > Your Site > Network > Merchant (conversion) > Network > You

If you're using PHP, one way of doing it is to use HTTP_REFERER, then include that string in your affiliate links using 'epi' on Tradedoubler, 'k' on DGM, 'clickref' on Affiliate Window, etc.

You can then login to the relevant networks and see which referrers generated which sales.

Hopefully that helps a bit.

[moredial]

You are better off analysing your own logs.

The source is even easier than your example - just use yourdomain/page?source for inbound links - works for static html pages too. Use a different 'source' for different keywords on ppc.

For outbound, pick up the IP address of the visitor as a variable and use that as the unique reference to add to the affiliate url.

You then track from referrer url to the affiliate report and compare the number of conversions with the number of referrers.

You can also track the conversions to see whether or not they visited any other pages on your site and how many times they visited you before conversion.