Tracking your conversions - how's it work?

[ergophobe]

I'm completely clueless about affiliate networks - two weeks ago the only one I could even name was Amazon. But I have some ideas that I think could fit into the affiliate model.

So I'm wondering, when you sign up for one of these programs, how detailed are the reports you receive? Can you tell which pages on your site are the ones that actually sent users to the merchant site, and what items they bought off your page? Do you at least get a breakdown of products actually sold, or just aggregates of how much business you generated each month?

If not, what methods do you use to figure out which of your pages are most effective? Do you just assume that those pages with the best click-through to merchant sites are the most effective and trust that the actual rate of purchase is the same for any given click through (assuming same product of course)?

Tom

[skibum]

It depends alot on the program of network, Tom.

Comission Junction

You do not know the specific products you've sold (maybe if you use a data feed you do but haven't gone that route yet)

You can put in an ID that can be for a specific link or a keyword so you know which ad placements are generating clicks and sales.

CJ does track the referring URL, as it shows up when clicks are generated to expired links but there does not seem to be a way to access that info for any other clicks.

Linkshare

I believe they are working on implementing IDs for tracking specific links and it is available if you ask about it and send in some form it can be enabled.

LinkShare offers the merchants the opportunity to pass back much more info to the affiliate. Some merchants do it & some don't.

Merchants can pass back:

Geographical regions where sales took place.
Individual items sold
Exact time and date the order was placed
Sales that occurred after a cookie expired
Type of link that generated the sale

Other networks and programs offer a variety of other reports and features but have yet to find one that comes close to providing the kind of info you can gather about activity and sales on your own site.

[ergophobe]

You can put in an ID that can be for a specific link or a keyword so you know which ad placements are generating clicks and sales.

I think that's mostly what I would want. It would br great if I could tie that to specific sales and know whether the product I suggest is the one actually purchased. Still trying to wrap my mind around how the whole thing works.