Why Tracking Is Important
Since accurate tracking is the means through which you get paid, it’s well worth your efforts to make sure that there aren’t any glitches either on the merchant’s end or due to affiliate fraud (see below). The other important reason to keep an eye on your affiliate tracking record is in order to plan marketing campaigns and to review their effectiveness.
How Affiliate Sales are Tracked
There are two overarching aspects to how affiliate sales are tracked. First the software may be specialized software run from in-house by the merchant or from outside by a third party. External software may be run separately, in which case—if you have a number of affiliate organizations—you may have quite a job keeping track, or by a network, if you have joined one, that consolidates all of your tracking into one place.
In terms of the technical elements of the tracking, there are a number of systems that are used: here are the names of some so that you will recognize them:
- Cookie tracking
- Pixel cookie with backup IP
- Pixel post
- Database – data capture
- Simple Direct URL Links
- URL Query String Tracking
- Self Replicated Pages
- Sub Domain Tracking
- Database Record Match Tracking
The exact data you need will depend on the affiliate agreement you have and the factors that go into your commission? Whichever one is being used, make sure it has the stats you need to understand the performance of your marketing efforts and the behavior of visitors to your site. The types of information you may need includes the following:
- Conversions (actions generated by visitors)
- CPA (Cost per action)
- CPM/CPT (Cost per thousand clicks)
- CR (Conversion Ratio)
- CTR (Click-Through-Rate)
- EPC (Earnings Per one hundred Clicks)
- Number of clicks
- Page views for each visitor
- Return Days (length of time an affiliate gets credit for sale to a customer who reached the merchant through the affiliate’s site
- Total of impressions (ads)
- Total page views
- Unique visitors to your site
Affiliate Fraud
One of the things a careful tracking can help with—though it won’t warn of everything—is identifying affiliate fraud. Because the industry is only in its second decade of existence, and because there is not yet an industry standard, in some cases it is hard to discern “best practice.” Nevertheless, some actions taken in the name of gaining affiliate compensation are clearly wrong, and these are some of the things to watch for as you monitor your tracking record:
- Parasites—steal traffic from (other) affiliates by replacing the real affiliate’s ID in links with their own, getting credit for the other’s sales.
- Cookie-stuffing—a method that leads the cookie-based tracking system to believe that a link has been clicked even when it hasn’t.
- Coupon Scraping—stealing cookies that are not intrinsically tied to a site from an authorized site and getting credit for their use.
- Cookie Overwriting—purposeful or unintentional overwriting of an affiliate’s cookie, sometimes done by a merchant’s newsletter, sometimes by other means. Because of the way that security systems present the presence of affiliate cookies to users when checking their systems, they may be moved to delete them, thus preventing the affiliate from getting credit for their purchases.
- Blockers—Spyware, security, and other systems can block ads, preventing viewers from ever seeing them. This may be a choice made by viewers or part of a default setting about which consumers are unaware.
