The way to Track Your Affiliate Product sales & Traffic

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In this article, I’ll explain how to track your own ClickBank sales AND visitors. Don’t worry if you don’t market any ClickBank products; the basic techniques outlined below may be used with any affiliate system with a “Tracking ID” service. Everything is also 100% free, I’m not trying to market any tracking systems right here!

Ok, let’s get started. If you are unfamiliar with ClickBank’s tracking IDENTIFICATION system then you can read more about this at ClickBank (read their own Hoplink FAQ). The problem is you are able only to track sales, not really clicks. Let’s examine an excellent example to demonstrate the problem and the remedy. Let’s say you have a webpage with this address:

On which page you’re promoting some ClickBank affiliate URLs:

You can see that “your” can be your ClickBank affiliate ID, “published” is the ID of the service provider you’re promoting, and “code1” is the tracking ID just for this particular link. If hundred people click on that URL and 3 of them get the product, that’s a conversion rate of 3%. A conversion process ratio is the percentage of folks you send to an affiliate marketing URL who buy the product. In this case, typically, the figure of 3% signifies that 3 out of every 100 website visitors, on average, became customers.

3% isn’t bad, but hold on a minute – ClickBank merely tells you there were 3 incomes for the tracking ID “code1”. You don’t know there were a hundred clicks on the link without this figure on the phone to calculate the conversion rate. What if 500 people possessed clicked on the link? The conversion process ratio would be just zero. 6% (i. e. zero. 6% of the 500 website visitors became customers). Ideally, you must only promote websites that may have a relatively high conversion rate. If you’re promoting two different ClickBank products, for example, then one has a conversion ratio involving 1% and the other 4%, you’d be better off focusing your own personal attention on the second single and ditching the first. You will only know this when you can calculate the conversion rate. Luckily, this problem is quickly sorted out with a simple click-tracker PHP script. The script counts the number of times an individual click on a link.

No longer worry if you’ve never employed PHP before; nothing is challenging. As long as you can post files to your webspace you should have no problem following these simple measures. It goes without saying that you also need PHP running on your server.

Check out PHPSuccessTools (see the useful resource box at the end for the URL), click “mailing list” from the navigation bar at the top with subscribe, then check your electronic mail for the password. This will provide you with full access to all the intrigue that is available. Click on “Free Scripts” in the navigation bar, then click on “Tagged Click Tracker.” Then fill out the form the following:

“Password”

You should always choose an arbitrary combination of letters and figures for your passwords, but to maintain things simple for this instance, enter “showstats” as the security password.

“Destination URL”

This is your own ClickBank affiliate URL having a tracking ID appended towards the end. It should look like this particular:

http://yourid.publisherid.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=[TAG] Make sure you substitute “your” with your ClickBank IDENTIFICATION and “published” with the Clickbank. Com ID of the merchant if you’re promoting.

“Optional Expiration”

Keep this box as it is; we don’t want the link to expire.

“Name”

Enter “go” for this.

You can leave the rest of the boxes as they are unless you determine what they do. Now hit “Submit.” Follow the instructions on the following page, where you’ll be requested to save several files on your computer and then upload them to your webspace and replace the permissions. Upload them to a similar folder as your index. css page (as this is the site we’ll edit in a few moments).

If you’ve never changed data file permissions before, then there’s a straightforward guide at PHPSuccessTools Rapidly click on “Guides” from the navigation bar at the top.

With this example, we’re assuming that you aren’t linking to a ClickBank affiliate marketing URL on your index site, so instead of linking instantly to ClickBank, change the link on your own “index. html” page to this particular:

[http://www.yourdomain.com/go.php?code1]

Let’s recap precisely what we’ve done. We swapped out the ClickBank affiliate URL on your “index. html” site with a link that goes on the click-tracker script (called get. php). The click-tracker piece of software, in turn, counts how many keys to press the link gets and redirects the surfer to the genuine ClickBank affiliate link.

At this point, we understand what’s altered, let’s see how it works. Be aware of the tracking ID (code1) at the end of the click-tracker URL:

[http://www.yourdomain.com/go.php?code1]

When somebody keys to press on that link, the actual click-tracker looks at the location URL (which you joined when the click-tracker was created) and replaces [TAG] with the tracking IDENTIFICATION. So in actual fact, the location URL becomes:

http://yourid.publisherid.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=code1
Right now, all you have to do is see the statistics for this click-tracker, and you will be able to see how many mice clicks your link got. The actual stats are available at this WEB ADDRESS:

[http://www.yourdomain.com/go.php?showstats]

Now let’s say that 100 people click on your brand-new click-tracker link, and three buy the product. Searching your ClickBank stats you will see that the tracking ID “code1” has produced 3 product sales. If you look at your click-tracker statistics you’ll see that “code1” additionally generated 100 clicks. Use the two figures together, and you may calculate the conversion proportion of 3%. In other words, 3% of the people you sent to the actual merchant bought the item.

The conversion ratio is essential to know. There’s no point delivering traffic to a merchant, which converts to 1%, whenever you could send that exact same traffic to a different merchant, which converts to 3%. Presuming the commissions earned for each sale is the same, you’re best with the second merchant. You will only know this through testing different merchants as well as calculating the conversion proportion of each.

In fact, there’s no have even to calculate the transformation ratio manually – the actual click-tracker does it for you! Just view the stats for the click-tracker and enter a “sales” figure for each tracking IDENTIFICATION. The click-tracker then instantly generates the conversion proportion for each one.

To finish away this article, let’s just rapidly see how you’d track product sales with more than one tracking IDENTIFICATION. If you only have one hyperlink to your ClickBank affiliate WEB ADDRESS then you won’t need to do this, but you may be wondering what if you have two links to ClickBank, one on “index. html” and the other on the blog? Use the subsequent URL on your blog exactly where your ClickBank affiliate WEB LINK goes typically:

[http://www.yourdomain.com/go.php?code2]

When you view your click-tracker stats, look for “code2” to see how many clicks this type of link received. Similarly, your own personal ClickBank stats will show “code2” as the tracking ID for virtually any sales that came from this URL.

You are free to choose just about any tracking ID you want (you don’t have to use “code1” along with “code2”). Just make sure your IDs only contain alphanumeric personas (no spaces or symbols) and are 50 characters or maybe less in length.

As I stated at the start of this article, you can use the techniques with any affiliate marketing network with a tracking USERNAME facility. When creating your click-tracker(s), enter your affiliate marketing URL as the “Destination URL” and place [TAG] wherever the tracking USERNAME should go.

If you’re feeling ambitious, I recommend you make use of the hit-tracker script, also freely offered by PHPSuccessTools Place a separate hit-tracker on each page in your internet site that contains affiliate links, and you will probably be able to calculate the click-through ratio as well as the conversion rate of those links.

Neil Cahill is a PHP programmer and part of the team You are liberal to reproduce this article providing zero changes are made to the body wording.

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