Tracking orders from referrals

[jrhanley]

This might be a noob question, but I haven't been able to find a satisfactory answer to this yet.

The site that I'm working on is looking to setup partnerships with various charitable organizations. The site will be 'selling' items through the Amazon.com affiliate program. We would like to be able to share the revenue that is derived from a direct referral from one of these partners.

Is there a way to attribute an order at Amazon.com to a specific referral site? We are only interested paying a % percentage of an actual order, not just for the referral itself.

Any suggestions or examples would be greatly appreciated.

[Beagle]

No, not a noob question, I don't think. At least not a simple one. The following is more brainstorming than any actual answer - which is why it's so long-winded ;-) . You might get some more specific ideas if you asked on the Associate Central message boards.

First of all, I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do. The way I'm understanding it is that these partner sites would not have amazon links, but yours would, right? Could you explain what you mean by a "direct referral"? Would the direct referral be specifically to an amazon link, or through a special link to your site, or just anyone who goes to your site from that site?

You can track how many visitors come from each site, but how you'd link that up with amazon purchases would be the problem. You can have multiple tracking IDs in your amazon account, but those are connected to specific links, not to customers. If you could set up some way that referrals from the different sites used different sets of amazon links... "Click here to help site x"? But, then, of course, you might get people who just like site x and weren't actually referred from there. Or have special links from each partner site to your site that would shunt visitors off to different sets of amazon links? Seems kind of overkill... Or something I'm not thinking of?

I don't know about using any kind of a cookie. I just read through the TOS to see if there was anything that said you couldn't have a "second tier" of referrals, and didn't see anything about it. But there are limitations on using cookies on your site if you have amazon links - I've never done anything using cookies, so I can't really interpret what the TOS said about them.

One thing amazon is always very clear about is that you cannot do anything that would connect a specific buyer with a specific purchase. They consider that against their privacy policy. That might affect how you could/couldn't use cookies or how far you could track a visitor from referral site to purchase. However you did it, it would have to be in a way that never got any specific personal information from the visitor.

I'm also not clear on what the partner sites would gain from having this arrangement with you instead of having amazon links on their own sites? Nonprofits can have amazon associate accounts, and many of them do. Or are they planning to do both - links on their sites and a percentage from you?

[jrhanley]

To try and be a little clearer, there are three sites involved in this scenario. Site A is a non-profit website. Site B is our site with Amazon links. Site C is Amazon.com.

If I have a visitor come to us from Site A and click on one of our amazon links AND places an order - Site A will get a percentage of the commission that we receive.

The problem is tracking the user once they get onto Amazon's site. I am only interested in those visitors that actually place an order - not just click the link.

I don't think there is a way to confirm that the user places an order automatically. We may need to setup a manual, user-initiated way to do this.

If anyone has any thoughts on automatically doing this, I would love to hear them.

thanks again.

[Michael Anthony]

Why not just set up another Amazon affiliate link/page for the partner so that their sales get tracked separately?

[Beagle]

The only way I can think of is having multiple tracking IDs, which you can have within your one amazon account. But those IDs are connected to links, not to people. If there's some way that you could get people from site A to click on one set of links, from site D on another set, etc., it could work (along the lines of Michael Anthony's idea, using different tracking IDs on the separate pages).

As far as I know, there's no way to track a customer after they go to the amazon site. That's where their privacy policy comes into play.

You might get at least as much goodwill from the nonprofit site backers if you flat out donated some money, or paid for space to get a nice link to your site as a "supporter". And it would certainly be easier. And the nonprofit sites could make more money if they had their own amazon links.

[jrhanley]

Having different tracking ids is a very workable idea. I hadn't thought of that at all.

Secondly, we are directly donating money to these charities as well - this is just another avenue for them to generate a little bit of money. It's not any kind of replacement for programs they already have in place.

Thanks guys for the info. That should get me started.

[Receptional]

So... sounds to me that you need "dynamic links".

In Amazon (according to Beagle) you can set up linksourcea, linksouceb, linksourcec etc - presumably with some logocal syntax to the hyperlink.

So first, you set up a cookie that gets laid down on your site, which corresponds to each charity referrer and matches an amazon linksyntax. Then, instead of having bog standard amazon links on the page, the page replaces the link dynamically with the lisinksourcea / b / c element on the fly (with a default override for onyone that deleted their cookies!).

I can's actually DO that, but it sounds as if it would be pretty straightforward for me to give to a PHP guy.