Better Tracking of Your Affiliate Sales Efforts

I’ve been selling affiliate products for a few years now as well as my own products. If you sell affiliate products as well, you know that you probably should be testing and tracking more than you do. If you get a sale do you know which of your links got the sale and on what specific page?

We know we should create a specific link for every page, video, social network but we often don’t do it. So we don’t know which links are producing better results so we can do more of that. I recently reached out to some of the affiliate managers and they were quite helpful.

Link Tracking

With the ShareASale affiliate network you can add a special parameter to your link namely afftrack=xxx. So instead of using the same link all over the place you might put afftrack=youtube for a link in your youtube video (or more specifically the exact video if you have more than one). Or for a blog post afftrack=blogTop10TwitterTools.

Deep Linking

Another thing many of us don’t do is link to a specific page on the product website. Many of us send people to the order now page or the home page, making it difficult for people to find the product at times or coming off as too salesy. Why not send them to a content rich page? Many times we don’t have this link or we waste time looking for a specific link that’s been created for us. With the ShareASale affiliate network you can pick any page you want at the vendor site (a blog post for example) then create your own custom link. That way you can send people to those pages from your social networks and not come across as spammy. The way this works is through cookies being stored on the users machine, even though they don’t go right to the order page, the cookie tracks the sites domain so you are credited for the eventual sale.

The amazing thing is that you could even link to a site totally separate from the product website, create your own custom link and as long as the person finds the product page (through that separate website link) you will be credited for the sale! So you could create a custom link to a youtube video if the video description has a link to the product page (so that the user can hopefully click it and buy). Of course this is a more indirect method. You would want to test both sending them direct to buy page (so no distractions) or to less sales-oriented pages.