Easy ClickBank conversion tracking

In my last post, how to make submission-Friendly Affiliate Links, I talked about how to create a simple PHP script to install on your web server to redirect visitors to an affiliate link. I left a short using the ClickBank ID function trace flag that sales came from visitors to that Web server. But with a little more work which lets you to create unique tracking IDs that you give much more information about where your sales really come from. That is the real key to affiliate marketing success: tracking conversions — determine which sales "funnels" lead to an actual sale. Once you know what's working, you can spend more time and energy (and money, in the case of PPC) to the profitable funnels while the Elimination of unprofitable.

As I did last time, is a ClickBank the sequence number is a combination of up to 24 letters and numbers. (It used to be limited to 8 characters, that what we have here a bit harder to do, but still possible if you're clever.)The tracking ID is added to the ClickBank hoplink (affiliate link) and passes the ClickBank system. If a sale is made, you will receive the corresponding tracking ID (if set) in the affiliate sales report.

For example, here is a hoplink to a 5-letter tracking ID:

The tracking ID actually appears on the ClickBank payment page as part of the affiliate ID. If you click the link above and proceed to the payment page, you'll see this at the bottom:

You should always test your affiliate links to ensure that the tracking that ID is passed correctly.

Note that tracking IDs are not case sensitive, i.e. "ID001" is the same as "id001".

So what should you keep track of? here are some ideas:

Date — know when your affiliate link was followed is valuable information. The sale happens sometimes days or even weeks after the first visit. For example, if I refer someone to the Rocket Spanish product, they should first sign up for a free 6-day Spanish mini course before purchasing the full course. for example, a click that occurred on February 15 (for example) generate a sales a full week later.If I got a promotional methods changed in the meantime, perhaps I accidentally blames the sale to the new promotion, when in fact the old one that actually worked.Time — know the time of the day also can be useful if you are promoting products through AdWords ads. If the majority of your sales late in the day happen, you can offer to the other parts of the day off and reduce costs by avoiding the tire-kickers. Geolocation — the IP address of the visitor back to a geographical location can be assigned. as with the time, this information can aid you in targeting your ads. (See my article what a website knows about you.)Referrer — when you click a link, browsers normally the URL of the original Web page (the page that the link was on) send to the Web server.This is called the "referrer" or "referrer header". treatment of the referrer (which the user can send the browser, so don't count on its presence) can tell you the source of that particular click.Extra information — you can get more information in the link cannot embed. AdWords, for example, a keyword insert feature that allows you to automatically insert the keyword that a click on the ad in the destination URL.

This includes probably 99% of the things you might want to track through a ClickBank id tracking

So how do you keep all this information?You can stuff a lot of it in the tracking ID itself, which is my favorite way of doing things.You have 24 characters to work with, so let's see how we can encrypt things:

4 characters for the date — two digits, day in two digits, 2 digits for the month.(Don't bother with the year, because that only at the end or beginning of a year business and you may need to find out what year the month and day are for.)4 characters for the time — 2 digits for the hours, minutes.

That lasts 8 characters of the 24, resigned 16 to work with. us to keep track of IP addresses (they can be encoded with 8 characters pretty easy) but there's no point doing it because of the ClickBank sales reports of the copper country.

What can we do with 16 characters, then? what about extracting some useful information about the referrer. clicks from submissions include the item ID in the referrer URL. clicks from search engine traffic include the keyword term. clicks from AdWords ads may also include the keyword term (if you use the special syntax {keyword} in the destination URL) and even information about whether the click on the search network or the content network. the possibilities are almost unlimited.

Here's another tip: all information that cannot be stored in the tracking ID itself can still be saved in a file or database.

If there is interest, I can be a simple tracking script that generates ClickBank track of names with some of this information in the post.

2 March 2010 | Filed Under AdSense

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