Affiliate Software - Tracking External Campaigns Made Easy

Many people don't realise that software has more uses than just "simple" management. It can be used to track activity (including conversions and ROI) of campaigns running on AdWords, Overture, or anywhere else.

First question is - why should you do it?

Most of the advertising systems do have some kind of sale conversion tracking.

This is true, but there are some benefits when you use your system to do the work:

You can compare the results of different campaigns

Affiliate software (if it's good one) will allow you to easily view reports of clicks, sales and conversions for given campaign. You can easily find out what pays of and what not.

Moreover, by comparing conversion ratio of different campaigns you can identify the weak points and try to improve them.

What if you'll find out that your Overture campaign converts much less visitors into buyers than AdWords?

If you know this, you can try to improve it. And when you make a change, the system will tell you again if your sale conversion increased or not, and how it compares to others.

No need to include multiple sale tracking codes

It is simply less work. When you have software installed, it already contains the sale-tracking snippet.

So you don't need to edit your pages and place the sale conversion codes for every new advertising system you plan to use, you'll simply use the affiliate's system build-in sale tracking capability.

It allows you to track also systems that don't implicitly offer sale conversion tracking

Google AdWords and Overture do have sale conversion tracking, but what if you buy campaign somewhere else? Or banner placement, sponsored listing, etc.?

You can even track free listing or text link included in some web directory or your friend's web page.

My company uses multiple marketing channels, for example we pay for sponsored listing on HotScripts. If we don't track it with system, we would have no idea how many visitors HotScripts sends to our page, and how many of them actually made a purchase.

Now, if I persuaded you that tracking ROI and conversions using system is a good idea, let's move to the next step - how to set it up.

It depends on the software you use, but most of them will have this functionality.

First of all, what can be tracked?

pay-per-click campaigns on Google AdWords, Yahoo Marketing and similar your own link exchanges with another website your paid advertisements on another web sites etc.

The principle is simple - you should create a special "virtual" for every system or campaign you want to track. Then use its link instead of your website URL in the campaign destination.

Because the advertisement on external website points to your site through link, system will track the clicks and purchases originating from this source as if it is your affiliate.

You can easily control how many clicks they are really sending to you, get the conversion ratio, etc.

Exact measurement of campaign results

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