Affiliate reports are generally pretty good - in that they give you quite a lot of information on the sale. What they obviously don't do is give you information on what the user has done on your site
a) Where he entered your site from (SE / direct link)
b) Which keyphrase he used
c) What page he entered on
d) How he navigated your site
e) Which page he left to go to the affiliate site
Most affiliate reports also let you put in a UID / EPI. In its simplest form you could just manually put the link on the page and write the UID as the page name.. at least, then you'll know which of your pages is converting best.
But.. if you want to find out more information, as above - what would be the best way of doing it? Potentially using a cookie? But how would this translate into the UID? Are there any other ways?
The next thing I'm thinking about (part 2!) is about setting up an affiliate scheme yourself. If you have a link on another site to you, and you want to potentially assign some percentage revenue to those people that click through and make an affiliate purchase on a merchant website, what is the best way of constructing that? If you have an identifier on the link (www.example.com/5628587462) then The value of that link is nowhere near as great (or zero!) as opposed to just links to www.example.com. So - this kind of system then means that you get no linking benefit.
Would be great if anyone has any ideas or thoughts on this type of tracking - thanks
since you don't have access to the merchant's cart / site for tracking feedback, your thinking of using clicking through to the merchant as a proxy / substitute for sales is one common way of attributing some analytics "credit" to your hand offs, which will also help your funnel and "conversion" analysis too.
so question is, can you code your links on your affiliate website to register within Google Analyticsw somehow, as something that gets recorded and can therefore be a part of a defined goal or process...
yep, you sure can.
current help file for tagging / tracking outbound links within GA:
[google.com...]
related discussions here, each with it's own insights (disregard the specific code on these threads, it's changed as time as passed, refer to the help file above):
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
have fun!
Effectively what I want to be able to do is tie in my analytics (I use some pretty good paid software which is comparable and has some extra stuff to Google analytics) to what happens on the merchant (external) site. This way I'll be able to analyse what the affiliate network tells me, and be able to analyse who the user that made the purchase was, and be able to tie this together to give me the full path.
Not entirely sure if I'm explaining myself well here!
so yes, you have a problem, the sales data in the affiliate interface can't be linked into your analytics package or conversion tracking within G... you'll have to integrate those two dataset groups separately... there are some third party products that claim to do this, but use caution here, that's a lot of valuable data.
sometimes, if you work with a merchant in volume, you can talk them into conditionally loading your conversion tracking pixel on checkout, so that you can close your data feedback loop. if the affiliate platform you're using sends the ssaid (or other data pair in the request), the merchant can set a cookie (for the merchant's site, i'm not referring to the affiliate tracking cookie, but a separate one the merchant sets themselves) that triggers the loading of your conversion tracking code snippet when the sale closes... in english now... the merchant's site checks if it's an affiliate sale, if so, on their confirmation "thanks for buying" page, they would also load the conversion tracking code that you as an affiliate have supplied.
this is rare, usually the merchant's affiliate manager won't understand why you want this (they aren't ppc people), how to get it (they aren't programmers or webmasters), or how to talk his peers into supplying it for you (their channel is among the smaller ones).
as a ppc affiliate, i've had some do this for me. but it is pretty rare, most affiliates aren't going to have had any experience with this.
i've told merchants who want to attract ppc and other power affiliates, offer conditional confirmation pixel tracking on your cart's back end - close their data feedback loop... build this and they will come. :-)
