Promoting Affiliate Programs – Tracking Codes

Affiliate product marketing produces a very good income for some marketers. For others, however, all it produces is a lot of work and expense with no results.

Why can one affiliate marketer drive off into the sunset in a Porsch while the other has to max out his or her credit card running ads and putting up sites?

The answer is simple: Tracking codes

Tracking codes on every page, site, article and ad tell you which promotions are producing results and which ones are not. Without them, it’s like shooting in the dark – if you shoot enough times you will eventually hit something but you have no idea which shot did the hitting.

I am going to break this down into three areas: Pay-per-click, SEO, and Article Marketing

Pay-per-Click(PPC)

While the most effective form of marketing, it’s also the most expensive. PPC can either make you a lot of money or lose you a ton. It all depends on which keywords and ads work. Without Tracking Codes, there’s no way to tell.

Each ad must be tied to a tracking code and each keyword must be tied to a tracking code. At the end of this article, I’ll give you some simple copy and paste code that can do this for you.

If an ad is working but only for 2 keywords, then you can eliminate all the others and make your campagin that much more profitable. If you are getting sales on 3 different keywords but only on 1 ad variation, then just use that ad.

The whole idea is to “optimize” your keywords and your ads for that one particular product until you have narrowed down which ad and keywords are making you money.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Some affiliate marketers will spend months getting their site up in the search engine rankings. It would be a shame to have all that effort go to waste. The only way to make sure there is a payoff once the site gets ranked is to use a tracking code on each page of the site.

If there are affiliate products on the site, you have got to know which pages are producing income and which ones are not. This little piece of information will tell you which pages to redesign or which products to switch out for others.

Here’s an old affiliate marketer saying for you – “Optimize, optimize, optimize”

Article Marketing

The same thing applies here: if you know which articles are working to generate traffic and sales, thenyou can go back and study those articles and write more of the same type. Or, if an article about a certain product produces a lot of sales, you can write more articles on that products subject.

Again, the whole secret of affiliate marketing is knowing where the sale came from – whether it was a PPC ad, a Web page, or an article.

So – how do you put in a tracking code?

I’ll give you two methods. There are more but these are the easiest.

The first is to include the tracking code in your affiliate link. Many affiliate sites like Clickbank make it easy to do.

For a clickbank product that you are promoting on your Blog, you would use maybe BLOG for your tracking code so it would appear like this:

PUT in the http here – -:// your complete affiliate URL, then at the end add ?tid=BLOG

Where your affiliate name is YOUR affiliate ID and the product name is the name of the product. When someone clicks on the link, the Tracking ID, BLOG, is passed through to the Clickbank reporting system so you can easily tell where the sale came from.

A little more complex is passing tracking codes through a website. It only takes one line of extra code. All you have to do is copy and paste from this and customize it for your site:

Add this bit of code at the very first of you page – before any html:

then php $seedvar=$_GET['id'];?>

Leave out the spaces. They are included here so that the code is not “live”.

That’s all it takes to pass a tracking code through your webpage. Now – there’s a couple of things you need to know to make this work.

First, when you are sending someone to the page from an ad or a banner or link, you have to put the full page URL like: http:://www.mysite.com/index.php?id=123

The page that you are sending the prospect to has to be saved as a php file. So, if it’s an index.html file, just save it as an index.php file but include the snippet of code above. In this example, the Tracking ID of 123 will be passed to the page.

Here’s the next part: The links on your page are a little different. The links will look like this:

a href=” http://yourID. productID.hop. clickbank.net/?tid=

When someone clicks on the link, they are directed to the affiliate product landing page BUT NOW there is also a tracking ID sent with them. That’s about all there is to it. 

Using tracking ID’s takes a little extra time but it’s well worth it to maximize your returns on all of your affiliate marketing.