Just made a sale - but who bought it?

How do you track who bought what?

[Gav101]

Say you have an affiliate campaign set up, and you advertise via method 1 and method 2.

If you see a comission appear in your affiliate account, is there a way to track whether that person arrived via advertising method 1 or advertising method 2?

Also, what if you have a ton load of advertising methods, can this be accurately tracked? So therefore you can concentrate on areas which are working for you?

[hunderdown]

That depends on what options are available to you. Does the affiliate program allow for tracking IDs? If so, you use one for one method, and another for the other.

Or if you are using a web site and not PPC straight to the affiliate, you can use different landing pages on your site.

Both of these methods can be extended to cover hundreds of different campaigns, if necessary.

[Gav101]

"That depends on what options are available to you. Does the affiliate program allow for tracking IDs? If so, you use one for one method, and another for the other."

Unfortunately, no, I can't do it this way. The links to the merchant from me can include:

- Links from my website (I have click counters on these)
- PPC from search enging 1
- PPC from search engine 2

etc

So as there are a number of ways to get to the affiliate link, I only have the information of how many times a particular link has been clicked. But what I need is to know which advertising method a particular buyer came from.

Surely there are people who do this?

[hunderdown]

Yes, and I know there are scripts available. Don't use them myself, so I can't point you to one. Have you searched WebmasterWorld?

[markwelch]

For some merchants (such as those using ShareASale or MyAP) you can append a "subid" code to the link, so that you can assign a different subid for each campaign or channel.

For example, if I create a series of web pages to promote products from MerchantX, my links on the "blue" page for "product 2" might be
"http://www.MerchantX.com/product.asp?affid=1234&sub=w-blue-product-2"

Then, whenever I see a sale, I can check which "sub" code was used, and then I know where the sale came from (in this case, the web site, blue page, product-2 link).

This is especially useful for Google AdWords campaigns.

[markwelch]

If the merchant's affiliate tracking technology doesn't allow any kind of "sub" ID code, then you might ask if you can get multiple affiliate IDs. Some systems, like CJ, allow you to define multiple sub-sites, each with their own link code, but all under the same account. For others, you might just need to create completely separate accounts and (for example) use one for AdWords, another for web site A, another for web site B, etc.