Better Tracking From Affiliate Networks - What Do You Think?

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Aequitas

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Feb 19, 2007
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This is just something that I want to get the opinions on from the people around here and its an idea I had suggested to some networks already.

I'm not sure exactly how all of you track your sites but how I track mine is pretty straight forward, what I like to do is if a visitor finds my site through a search term in Google, Yahoo, or MSN, I rip apart the header info and grab the keyword in which they found my site through, after that if they click on any offers I have up I record the keyword they came from, the click they made, and which offer they clicked on.

I have my own custom scripts to handle all of this stuff and what this information gives me is the ability to determine which keywords I would rather have my site ranking for, an example may be that I am getting a great CTR on Offer A from keyword B, and so on and so forth.

But once the visitor clicks on an offer I feel like I'm loosing complete control over the final tracking bit, for instance I would like to pass the keyword along to the networks where that visitor came from so I can determine exactly how many sales or leads came from which keyword my site is ranking for but not only that.

By being able to pass a keyword to the network I would be able to much easier target my ads after the initial testing phase, I would also be able to determine with much more accuracy which keywords are resulting in more conversions and in return which PPC terms would be better to bid on.

You can already do this with some networks like MaxBounty which allow you to transfer an additional s1 and s2 value so you can see which keywords resulted in the sale but you still have to rip it apart and do up the stats by hand once they result in a sale.

I think it would be nice for more networks to include this one last bit of tracking so they could tell you that if you passed to them keyword A, which resulted in a sale they could show you that stat along with the others.

Now the problem with all of this of course is that your giving the Networks the ability to pretty much determine exactly which keywords are resulting in the most amount of sales for you and most wouldn't want that information getting around to other affiliates or even having the networks themselves starting to bid on the profitable terms which would drive up the PPC rate.

Anyway just curious to talk about this some more and get some more tracking ideas flowing from both the affiliate and network standpoints, the nice thing about a system like this though is that the networks themselves wouldn't have to change there existing system, they would only have to allow the option to pass another variable through the URL and make a couple small database query changes.
 


90% of networks do have tracking. This can be done without the network having any knowledge of what keyword they arrived from. This can be 100% automated.

You are an idiot.
 
Insomniac said:
90% of networks do have tracking. This can be done without the network having any knowledge of what keyword they arrived from. This can be 100% automated.

You are an idiot.
Click to expand...


ROFL thanks for that I needed to laugh
 
Insomniac said:
90% of networks do have tracking. This can be done without the network having any knowledge of what keyword they arrived from. This can be 100% automated.

You are an idiot.
Click to expand...

Your also an idiot cause I wasen't talking about simple subIDs meathead, I was leaning more towards an additional optional way to pass your keyword through the URL (Exactly like how we do it with Sub-ids) but then on the other end have the networks include those in the statistical results they show us so you could see something like 10 people from keyword A bought offer B.

The way we have to do it now is similar but with sub-ids we still have to take the time and organize all the results returned by the networks, it would be nice to have a system in place that could speed up and clean up the whole process.
 
I believe the important thing is to be able to track the keyword without passing it. You don't want to give the networks the preforming keywords, because [tinfoil hat on]they could start using them for themselves[tinfoil hat off].

Basically, as was said, this can all be done yourself, and automated. It will take some work, but unless you want to buy my script for $97 (price going up soon, act now!), that's what it will take.

I always wanted to use that line... :-)
 
Aequitas said:
Your also an idiot cause I wasen't talking about simple subIDs meathead, I was leaning more towards an additional optional way to pass your keyword through the URL (Exactly like how we do it with Sub-ids) but then on the other end have the networks include those in the statistical results they show us so you could see something like 10 people from keyword A bought offer B.

The way we have to do it now is similar but with sub-ids we still have to take the time and organize all the results returned by the networks, it would be nice to have a system in place that could speed up and clean up the whole process.
Click to expand...

dude, insert that user's data (referer, kw, date & time, user agent, whtaever) into a database table that will create a unique id for that row. pass that row id as the sub id. from your stats you'll see which sub ids (kws and other data) converted better than others.
 
Anyone wanna point me to a PHP tutorial that shows me how to grab the keyword from a natural search?
 
kyleirwin said:
dude, insert that user's data (referer, kw, date & time, user agent, whtaever) into a database table that will create a unique id for that row. pass that row id as the sub id. from your stats you'll see which sub ids (kws and other data) converted better than others.
Click to expand...

Ok I understand what everyone here is saying now, then I admit with that said I am an idiot haha.
 
kyleirwin said:
$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']
Click to expand...

To Add To this code you can do something along these lines.

Code: 
$refer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
// GOOGLE CODE
     if(preg_match("/http:\/\/www.google/", "$refer")) {
       $subject = "$refer";
       $pattern = '/q=(.*?)&/';          
       preg_match_all($pattern,$subject,$match,PREG_SET_ORDER);

       $subject = $match[0][0];  
       $replacement = array("q=" => "", "&" => "", "+" => " ");
       $keyword = strtr("$subject", $replacement);
       trim($keyword);
     }

// MSN CODE     
     if(preg_match("/http:\/\/search.sympatico.msn/", "$refer")) {
       $subject = "$refer";
       $pattern = '/q=(.*?)&/';          
       preg_match_all($pattern,$subject,$match,PREG_SET_ORDER);
       
       $subject = $match[0][0];  
       $replacement = array("q=" => "", "&" => "", "+" => " ");
       $keyword = strtr("$subject", $replacement);
       trim($keyword);
     }
     
// YAHOO CODE
     if(preg_match("/http:\/\/search.yahoo/", "$refer")) {
       // The Click Came From Yahoo So Grab The Keyword
       $subject = "$refer";
       $pattern = '/p=(.*?)&/';          
       preg_match_all($pattern,$subject,$match,PREG_SET_ORDER);
       
       $subject = $match[0][0];  
       $replacement = array("p=" => "", "&" => "", "+" => " ");
       $keyword = strtr("$subject", $replacement);
       trim($keyword);

     }
However you may want to clean it up a bit.
 
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that whole script is on my blog for click tracking, recording to a db then passing the rowid in as the subid. If you're slick just code up a class to interact with your affiliate companies. Pull the converstion data, add the records to a db and then make a nice report. You run that on a cron however often you want to pull the data. Now if you want one last piece you can have adwords email you reports on keyword spend for periods of time. Then have an auto parsing script for that and insert it into your db. Then you can see spend -> Conversion ROI.

But if you have a relationship and are pushing enough traffic to the company. Just have them place a conversion pixel if you don't mind sharing your info with google. As this will pass a unqiue identifier and not your keyword data.

Make sure you use a meta refresh and pass you get vars through it as they can pull you data from the referer pretty easy if you don't.
 
An idea I had is to tack on subIDs on the fly, but push those through a jumbler that transforms KWs into random #s that won't mean anything to the networks. You'll know based on the subIDs what KWs made the conversions, but the networks won't.
 
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