This post is the second in the series on click tracking.
If you have not yet read the first post in the series : Why you should measure your success, this is a good time to do so.
Four Types Of Commercial Website
For the purposes of our discussion, according to how the site makes money, there are four types of business website.
There are websites that exist to :
- Build a brand.
The content is free and often user-generated. The site is not directly selling anything. Revenue will be generated by other channels. A good example would be My Starbucks Idea - Build an audience.
This site delivers free content. The site owner generates revenue by selling advertising space on the site or by selling access to its email list. A good example of a site like is HiStats. - Market and sell the site owner's products/services.
Revenues are generated from product or service sales. - Market third party products/services.
Revenues are generated from affiliate commissions of any resulting sales.
This post is concerned with the use of click tracking for the 4th item in this list : affiliate sites.
The Sales Funnel
The sales funnel is a marketing term for the process of leading the prospect through the four phases of a sale:
- Stage 1 - Awareness
- The prospect becomes aware of the product as a possible solution to their problem. The prospect is classified as a unqualified lead.
- Stage 2 - Interest
- The prospect investigates the product (and competing products) to figure out if the product is a good fit. The prospect is now a qualified lead.
- Stage 3 - Desire
- The prospect likes the product and is considering a purchase. The prospect is now classified as a sales opportunity and it is now a matter of closing the sale.
- Stage 4 - Purchase
- The prospect finally becomes a customer by making a purchase.
But Why Is It Called A Sales Funnel?
It is referred to as a funnel as the numbers of people entering the funnel at the top, reduce at each stage of the process.
So for example, of 100 leads who are aware of your product then 5 may become qualified leads, of which 3 may become opportunities and 1 finally becomes a customer.
The overall conversion rate of the sales funnel is 1%, with a 5% conversion rate for lead generation, 60% for lead development and 33% for sales closure.
Please note that conversion figures will vary hugely between email, ads and search engine listings.
As an affiliate business you will invest time and money at each stage. Your tracking must provide an understanding of how money spent in the first three stages impacts the earnings in the final stage.
This information will inform future decisions about how to improve the funnel.
For example, is money best spent improving lead qualification, or is is better spent on paid traffic so more leads can be added into the funnel?
Affiliate Product Sales Funnel
An affiliate sales funnel is a complicated affair. You have less control than if you were selling your own product.
There are third parties involved (the affiliate networks such as Amazon, ShareASale, ClickBank, Peerfly) who may only offer you limited visibility of the prospect's progress through the funnel.
You send traffic to the vendor's sales page and you hopefully receive affiliate income some weeks later. The challenge is to identify which traffic resulted in the sales.
The problem is that most affiliates rely purely on hope.
Choice Of Tracking Tool
For an affiliate sales funnel you need a tool that has been specifically designed to deal with two main challenges:
- Handling paid traffic of unknown quality
- Tracking the prospect through the sales funnel across multiple systems where some only offer you restricted access to tracking information.
A good click tracking tool meets these challenges with some of following features:
- Spam/Bot Filtering - identify and block robots so they do not skew the numbers
- Click Fraud Detection - identify fake clicks on your paid traffic so you do not end up paying for worthless traffic
- Geo-targeting - redirect traffic to different offers based on their location - as some offers are often only available in specific countries
- Mobile filtering - redirect traffic to different landing pages based on the visitor's device
- Traffic Quality Analysis - get automatic notification of low quality traffic if its performance drops below a threshold
- Link Monitoring - get automatic notification if your landing page site is not available
- Split Testing - easily test different offers to see which performs best
- Link Rotators - split traffic across multiple offers on a round robin basis or until some threshold is met
- Retargeting - drop retargeting cookies so your ads can follow prospects who have clicked your links
- Postback Pixel Tracking - add postback pixels on thank you pages that indicate that a conversion (sale) has taken place
- Postback URL Tracking - define a postback URL that the third party will use to notify you a conversion (sale) has taken place. The third party (the affiliate network) will typically indicate parameters on the URL that identify which product has been purchased, who the merchant is and the amount of commission earned.
Awareness - Sending Traffic From Various Sources
For the most lucrative affiliate sites the traffic sources are usually paid. To be commercially viable, the earnings per click need to exceed the cost per click.
The paid traffic sources may include the following:
- Google Adwords
- Bing Ads
- BuySell Ads
- 7Search
- Facebook Ads
- Twitter Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
- Other Social Pay Per Click networks such as Plenty Of Fish
- Outbrain Amplify
- Solo ads - links in email sent from a large player in your niche
- Paid Referral Links
- Paid Directory Links
The link you place in your ad will have one or more subIDs. These can be used to identify the traffic source, the campaign and the specific ad.
Interest - Identifying the Prospect and Opening A Communication Channel
For some affiliate products, all you can do is promote the product and generate interest through the copy on your landing page and then provide a link to the vendor site with your affiliate code.
For others you could offer a bonus and hence you may want to capture their details before sending them through the vendor site. This will allow you to offer your leads other related products in the future.
The bonus will be related to the product being marketed. It could be video tutorial or e-book on how to use the product, or it could be a complementary product.
To qualify for the bonus you will require them to either:
- supply their email or
- download your Facebook App or
- join your Facebook group or
- follow you on Twitter
When capturing their email you will want to record the subids in custom fields in your email autoresponder system.
Each email in the autoresponder will inform the prospect on the benefits of the products and provide either a link to your landing page or your affiliate link.
Creating Desire And Closing The Deal
There is not much you can do to close the deal as this happens on the vendor's website. The inducement you can provide is the bonus offer however it is not easy to work scarcity into this. You are largely reliant on what the vendor offers and so your skill in choosing an offer is key.
The link you have on your landing page takes the prospect to the vendor's sales page. This link is provided by an affiliate network
What Is An Affiliate Network?
The affiliate network is an intermediary that manages the relationship between the vendors of product and the affiliates.
Affiliate networks provide vendors with:
- affiliate payment management
- conversion and commissions tracking
- affiliate management
- access to a pool of potential affiliates
- fraud detection
Affiliate networks provide affiliates with:
- a guarantee of payment
- an aggregation of payments
- a trusted third party for commission tracking and registering
- access to many affiliate merchants
- access to affiliates tools
- reporting tools
- tools for comparing and choosing most profitable programs
Well known affiliate networks include
- LinkShare
- Commission Junction
- Amazon
- MaxBounty
- Ebay Partner Network
- ClickBank
- ShareASale
- Peerfly
- FlexOffers
- RevenueWire
- AffiliateWindow
- LinkConnector
Tracking The Purchase
The link you include on the landing page which takes the prospect to the vendor sales page will go via the affiliate network. It will include several parameters
- the vendor/merchant ID
- the product ID
- your tracking ID
The prospect will then spend time on the sales page and may purchase the product. Any sale is communicated to the affiliate network in order that you can be paid your affiliate commission (14-28 days later to allow in some cases for refunds or cancellations)
The affiliate network may provide some mechanism for you to track the sale. This can be a via a tracking pixel, a postback URL, a tracking API or by downloadable reports.
Whatever the mechanism, the information will identify the following:
- the vendor (merchant)
- the product(s) sold
- the amount paid
- the commission due
- the date/time of the transaction
- a transaction ID
- the tracking ID you passed through
The tracking pixel and postback URL approaches will automatically update your tracking system with the details of the sale.
However, in the case of the API or download more work is required since rather than the transactions being given to you, you have to go and fetch them.
Therefore it is necessary to set up a automatic job to connect to the affiliate network on (probably) a daily basis to capture the sales information and then reformat it so it is suitable for upload into the tracking system.
In the case of ClickMagick, the file format very simple and consists of 3 fields: the tracking ID, the amount and the timestamp of the transaction.
Next Post: Affiliate Sales Funnel For ShareASale Products
The next post in this series will be a worked example of how to add tracking to an affiliate sales funnel. The product is the Exective Pro Genesis child theme; the vendor is StudioPress, the affiliate network is ShareASale and the tracking software is ClickMagick
