Forum Moderators: DixonJones
I want to find out which sessions on my affiliate site result in a sale on the merchants' sites. E.g. I receive 100 visitors a day for the phrase 'blue widgets'. 50 of these come from organic Google, 25 from Adwords, and 25 from Overture. I get 10 sales a day on the merchants site. What is the referring source of the successful sales? Did they all come from organic Google? Maybe an even spread between all 3 sources?
Using Tracking/Session IDs it is possible to find out which user sessions resulted in a sale. This data is available from the networks, ususally in CSV format. The tricky bit is importing this data back into a traffic stats package, or rather, the tricky bit is finding off the shelf software that enables this to be done.
Once the networks CSV files have been imported, it would be a simple enough task to match up commissions earned with the recorded traffic on the traffic stats software. So for example, I would be able to ascertain that my PPC budget is wasted as all the conversions come from the organic Google listings. Having access to this info can obviously make a huge difference to the profitabilty of an affiliate site.
The only software I've found that has this capability is Urchin 5. Version 6 doesn't have this functionality. However, I am not too keen to give Google (the new owners of Urchin) any more conversion data.
Does anyone know of any other traffic stats software that has the necessary functionality to import network commission data and match this up with the relevant traffic stats?
Do any affiliates do this? Did you write your own software to make it possible?
Thank you.
That's what I would do, anyway.
Other than that, what are you saying - that the merchant will give you their entire logs in csv? log files usually come in .txt format, so without knowing what you would get in the CSV, I can't help to answer the question.
No chance of getting any code on the merchants sites unfortunately. There are too many merchants, and they are too big. Many of them are big name brands.
It is the affiliate networks (e.g. TradeDoubler) who supply the csv files. They basically pass us back our session IDs, together with details on any commissions that were earned as a result of a clickthru from our sites.
Cheers
Could you take that CSV file and convert it into web serve log format (Apache common or combined for instance, or W3C if you are using IIS)?
Once converted, you could just add that log to the analysis session and using the session ID's data could match-up quite nicely. The biggest drawback might be the timestamp difference between servers, which might put the sale conversion before your referral time-wise.
Just an idea....
Larry
