General Marketing - Affiliate Marketing

When you've built your affiiliate site you are going to be sending your hard won traffic to the affiiliate destination at some point. How do you know how many visitors are going through your affiliate links?

In addition to this how do we set an affiliate link click as a "goal" in analytics so that we can start to fathom which links are the most interesting to our visitors and which convert into the most sales - or both.

You do not want to set your affiliate link clicks as "conversions" from pay per click as they are not. They are goals. You need to place your conversion code or get it placed - on the merchants offer page. Most good offers with dedicated affiliate managers will be able to place a pixel for you on the offer page so that you can measure conversions from pay per click campaigns.

Here is a new Casino Reviews affiliate site I started a week or so ago that uses this technique. I had the nice name hanging around which I picked up years ago and thought I better put it to good use.

Make a folder in your root directory and name it with a relevant name so for example "affiliateoffer"

In this folder make an index.php page with the following code:

?>

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));


var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-3071767-3");
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();





I've lifted this code from one of my poker sites so that you can see what I have done here.

Firstly it's a php file - so make sure you name your file .php!

The first part of the script is your google analytics code. By placing this code in the index.php file you are now able to set a goal for this file in your analytics and all traffic that goes through this index.php file is now counted as a goal. The setup should look like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/affiliateofferone/index.php

This url goes into your goal configuration. You don't need any other goal funnels for this, this is simply to count the number of people going through your affiliate URL and it will show up as a goal for every visitor that goes through this page.

The second bit of the code where it starts with window.location is the bit that redirects the visitor through your affiliate link and lands them up at the destination page you want them to get to. They don't know it's happened and it's all seamless - they just see the index.php page if they are looking.

This simple bit of coding counts every visitor that goes through your affiliate link as a goal so that you can measure what percentage of visitors are going through your links as opposed to just reading pages and then getting out of there, useful for telling you if you need to drastically improve the quality of your content.

Then after it's fed the data into analytics it proceeds to redirect the visitor to your chosen affiliate landing page.

And lastly it hides your affiliate link which is a nice added bonus.

It takes a bit more work to set this up but once you get used to it you'll find it really does improve the quality of your data that you get back from analytics and you can start to work on it.

The only drawback is with analytics itself in that you can only set four goals per profile. They obviously have a reason for doing this and I don't know what it is! So if you have ten affiliate links then you need to set up three profiles to capture all of the data.

Then again this is another good reason to focus on a small amount of affiliate offerings!

When you next check your analytics stats the data is now starting to mean something. We can see what percentage of visitors are going through our main affiliate links. Now you know how much traffic is getting to your site and how much of it is effective traffic. You can now start to see which keywords are producing goals for you and which are producing more pageviews, so now you can focus on getting traffic for keywords which are producing goals.

Obviously this will help massively to drive down costs of your pay per click campaign but also once you know which types of keywords are producing results you can go to work on getting natural traffic for these terms in the certain knowledge that they are going to produce affiiate clicks for you.

Note that this doesn't neccessarily mean that you will make more money, if the affiliate offer you are sending them to has a weak offer or horrible landing page then you still might not get there.

So the next step is to introduce your goal value. Once you have a good sample of clicks to your offer and you know how many clicks are resulting in a commission value then you can determine what your goal value is.

So for example on my new casino site I find that I send 100 visitors to 32red and it results in £10 commission. So my goal value is .10p - each click is worth 10p. Obviously it's a small sample so you need to revisit your affiliate accounts often to make sure it is the same conversion rate.

You do the same for your other major affiliate links and now you get a good picture of what your affiliate offers are producing in revenue as a percentage of traffic. If you've got a low producing offer you can swap for a different one to try and improve your goal value.

All of this takes time and effort but those that bother to implement ANY sort of tracking are way ahead of the curve because I guess 95% of affiliates don't bother.

Out of a random sample of 100 affiliates, 80 will sign up and do nothing, 10 will look at it. 5 Will implement the creatives , 3 will make some money and 2 will make a lot of money. That's just how it is in affiliate marketing. Some people expect it all to land in their lap and a tiny minority will treat it seriously and do the work to make it happen.

< Prev