Affiliate link tracking is a method that revolutionizes advertising. It functions like traditional advertising—aiming to persuade people to purchase goods or services. However, it is less overt and feels less intrusive.
This approach enables engagement with content that users already like and trust, allowing them to discover products that may be useful to them.
This article investigates the nature of affiliate marketing and the benefits of tracking affiliate links. It offers guidance on building a profitable affiliate platform and provides tips and best practices for choosing affiliate link tracking software.
Importance Of Affiliate Links
Affiliate marketing is a type of brand-content creator relationship that allows the promotion of another company’s products and earning commissions from sales. For the advertiser, affiliate network, or brand to attribute sales to the right person (affiliate), marketers usually use links that look like product page URLs with additional unique tags.
Why Are Affiliate Links Used?
In affiliate marketing, link tracking monitors the performance of links that direct traffic from an affiliate’s platform (such as a blog, social media account, or website) to a merchant’s site where a transaction occurs.
It is an integral part necessary not just for campaign optimization but also for the core affiliate processes to happen. Without tracking which links initiate link conversions, the affiliates would be unable to collect their rewards, while the advertisers would not be able to evaluate the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
Companies have doubled their affiliate marketing spending in the last decade, and the U.S. has the largest share of the world affiliate market. With growing competition, spending resources on affiliate marketing may not yield results without smart analytics through link tracking.
While affiliate marketing has been used across all industries, it has proven to be especially fruitful for the retail sector contributing to 43% of total market revenue. The effectiveness of affiliate advertising in the retail industry can be attributed to several factors:
- Frequent Purchases: Retail products have a short purchase cycle compared to other products, resulting in ongoing opportunities for affiliates to earn commissions.
- Visual Appeal: Many retail sectors, such as beauty, fashion, and home goods, especially benefit from advertising emphasizing their visual appeal. Affiliates can employ such promotions by generating content with videos, images, and text reviews. For example, using colorful backgrounds on Instagram stories can further enhance the visual impact of these promotions.
- Vast Product Selection: Retailers typically operate in highly competitive environments, offering various products for different needs. Integrating affiliate campaigns into their strategies is a cost-effective solution for reaching the target audience without the need for expertise in the field.
Other industries that have seen success with affiliate marketing links are travel, beauty and wellness, B2B, finances, and online gaming.
Benefits Of Using Affiliate Links
Affiliate link tracking provides a wealth of information for seasoned marketers. Its core functionality is to indicate where the sales come from and who gets the commissions. It can also be used to analyze site performance, the effectiveness of affiliate partnerships and affiliate marketing networks, and more.
Here are the practical benefits of link tracking for marketing campaigns:
- Trackable links offer information about various affiliate campaign management metrics, such as click-through rates and conversion rates. These data provide insights into campaign effectiveness and allow for the calculation of the return on investment.
- By exploring user engagement rates, content creators can estimate which types of content align better with particular promoted products. Similarly, advertisers can use this data and video ad makers to create video ads for future affiliate campaigns and find affiliate partners focused on specific types of content.
- Marketers learn their target audience’s behavior and preferences by analyzing which links users click on, how much time they spend on a product page, and what further actions they take. This knowledge can be used to fine-tune ad strategies and even be considered when developing a new product or modifying an existing one.
- Affiliate analytics provides additional insights into user traffic on the website. Content creators can focus their efforts on the channels that generate the most traffic to increase conversions from affiliate links.
Common Methods To Track Affiliate Links
For a deeper understanding of affiliate tracking, knowing exactly how it functions is important. There are several core methods that affiliate systems use to track information about users and conversions.
Affiliate tracking methods play a crucial role in the success of affiliate marketing campaigns, allowing businesses to monitor conversions and attribute sales. Here’s an overview of several affiliate tracking methods:
- Cookie-based tracking: Historically, cookie-based tracking has been the predominant method for affiliate tracking. When a user clicks on an affiliate link, a cookie is deposited in their browser, which tracks their activity and attributes any subsequent conversions to the affiliate. However, with the impending phase-out of third-party cookies by browsers like Google, this method’s effectiveness is diminishing.
- Pixel-based tracking: Pixel-based tracking involves placing an invisible tracking pixel on the merchant’s website to gather data on user behavior and conversions. This method offers greater precision than cookie-based tracking, as it cannot be disabled by users. However, it may only monitor specific interactions and lacks insights into demographics and purchase history.
- Cookie-free tracking (Server-to-Server): Cookie-free tracking, also known as server-to-server tracking, bypasses cookies altogether, making it resilient to changes in cookie policies. This method relies on unique identifiers embedded in URLs to track conversions and attribute sales to affiliates. It offers robust tracking capabilities without relying on cookies.
- Manual tracking: Manual tracking is the oldest method of affiliate tracking, involving labor-intensive analysis and data correlation from various sources such as e-commerce platforms and marketing tools. Affiliates are assigned unique referral codes or links, and their activity is manually correlated with sales data to attribute commissions. While this method lacks automation, it provides direct attribution of sales to affiliates.
Each affiliate tracking method has its advantages and limitations, and businesses may choose the most suitable method based on their specific requirements and preferences. As the affiliate marketing landscape continues to evolve, brands must adapt their tracking methods to ensure accurate attribution and effective management of their in-house affiliate programs and networks.
Guide To Building Affiliate Links
Now that we’ve covered affiliate marketing and affiliate tracking links, let’s explain the necessary steps to start an affiliate business, post and track affiliate links, and earn commissions.
Build An Affiliate Platform
To build a platform to promote affiliate products to users. Creating a website is perhaps the most important step, as it allows for posting diverse content and linking your other platforms, such as a YouTube channel, to the website.
From the beginning, plan your website to include the type of content that is most optimized for affiliate marketing, such as review and comparison articles. Blog websites are perfect for that and need little development to create and manage, especially if you use the WordPress content management system.
Find A Focus Niche
Find a focus niche to write articles about and promote related products. As a rookie affiliate marketer, consider three factors when choosing the niche for your affiliate marketing business:
- Competitiveness
- Commercial value
- Personal interest
The first two can be explored using a keyword search tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. The trick is to identify whether the competition would allow you to rank for keywords relevant to your website while having relatively high search demand. In other words, find a niche not too wide so you don’t have to compete with thousands of experienced platforms for search engine rankings but narrow enough to attract a dedicated audience.
Finally, creating content on a topic you’re interested in provides two significant benefits: it makes it easier to position yourself as an expert in the field and earn visitors’ trust, and it makes your work more enjoyable.
Connect With An Affiliate Marketing Program
Affiliate programs allow for generating unique links and tracking their performance. Such programs can be managed directly by brands looking to promote their products or by separate platforms earning money for intermediary services.
Identifying affiliate programs that offer links for the products relevant to your niche is easy. Simply research your affiliate competitors and see what the links they promote look like.
For example, if you’re interested in chef’s knives, type “best chef’s knives” in the Google search bar and open one of the top search results. Many of them will show product listicles with affiliate links to product pages.
In the above example, the Amazon affiliate link is attached to the product title, leading to a promoted Amazon product page. The link’s URL includes a ‘tag’ parameter related to Amazon’s affiliate program. It identifies the specific affiliate partner, i.e., a website promoting the product.
To kickstart your search, here is the list of the most popular affiliate programs that cover all industries and offer different commission structures:
The Amazon Associates Program, mentioned earlier, is the largest platform offering affiliates the opportunity to earn commissions. With over 350 million products on sale, it covers all niches, even very specific niches, such as products from luxury fashion brands, and is probably the most trusted eCommerce platform. Another Amazon advantage for affiliates is its presence in many countries, allowing promotion to multinational audiences with the same affiliate links and content.
The main con of the Amazon affiliate program is that the commissions are quite low, ranging from 1% to 20%, and better offers can be found for many niches. Additionally, Amazon cookies last only 24 hours, meaning affiliates earn commissions only if users purchase promoted products within one day after clicking affiliates’ product links.
Target is a chain of department stores in the United States with a huge choice of products for sale online. Like Amazon, its payout rate is quite low, with a maximum payout of 8%. However, Target affiliate links’ cookies last for 7 days.
CJ Affiliate (formerly known as Commission Junction) is an affiliate network rather than a retailer, as is the case with the previous two platforms. Brands who want to start an affiliate program sign up with CJ so they can handle all the tracking and software-related issues. The advantages of this network include access to thousands of affiliate programs with different payback policies. Moreover, you’re not limited to physical products, as many travel, software, and service providers are signed up to CJ.
The downside, however, is that you must get accepted to each affiliate program on CJ separately, which is often problematic for a starting affiliate with little website traffic.
Another affiliate network worth mentioning is ShareASale. It functions much like Commission Junction but has a slightly smaller user base and a different selection of merchants. It is also known to be more accessible to starting affiliates.
Learn about these affiliate programs in more detail or consider other options to find the best match for your needs.
Plan Customer Path To Affiliate Links
Not every visitor landing on your site is ready to buy. Part of your target audience may visit your site with purely informational intent. Besides, your educational rather than purely commercial web pages and blog articles are more likely to get backlinks, be seen as more authoritative by Google, and rank higher in SERPs.
Careful content mapping, user-friendly navigation, and high-quality content can increase website traffic and conversions.
Content mapping involves strategically planning content to guide users to web pages with affiliate tracking links. For instance, your home page, how-to tutorials, and general niche reviews may be the first ones that users visit. They also increase the site’s credibility. As users navigate through the website, they should eventually reach conversion-focused pages, such as product reviews, one-on-one product comparisons, and listicles.
The results achieved by the inbound linking are two-fold:
- Leading users through the buyer’s journey
- Increasing the authority of the focus pages, as linking more authoritative pages to them signals their relevance to Google
How To Choose Affiliate Link Tracking Software
Affiliate marketing platforms, like Amazon Associates Program and ShareASale, provide detailed insights into conversions occurring after users click affiliate links generated by the relevant platforms. They may also offer payment management tools to automate financial transactions between affiliates and advertisers.
To maximize affiliate link tracking effectiveness it requires additional steps that cannot be fulfilled by affiliate programs. These include tracking the user’s customer journey from the initial touch point to clicking the affiliate link. Then analyzing the performance of multiple programs and strategies, and managing affiliate links across several digital channels.
When deciding on link tracking software, consider that your affiliate business hopefully will scale up. Think ahead and find a solution that can accommodate diverse marketing needs.
Use the following tips as a checklist for partnering with the best affiliate tracking software company:
- Prioritize software with robust payout management capabilities for seamless commission distribution.
- Look for built-in reporting and analytics tools to track affiliate performance and campaign effectiveness.
- Ensure the software supports customizable tracking parameters and offers flexibility in tracking methods.
- Seek integration with popular e-commerce platforms and affiliate networks for streamlined operations.
- Opt for affiliate marketing software that provides real-time tracking and reporting to monitor campaign performance promptly.
- Consider scalability and ease of use, especially if you anticipate future growth in your affiliate program.
- Choose companies that harness top-notch technologies, such as AI chatbots and predictive analytics.
- Look for features like fraud detection and prevention to safeguard against affiliate fraud and ensure data integrity.
- Evaluate customer support options and user reviews to gauge the software’s reliability and responsiveness.
- Compare pricing plans and consider the affiliate tracking software’s affordability and value relative to your budget and needs.
- Test out demo versions or trial periods to assess the software’s functionality and suitability for your business.
The mentioned functionalities are essential for digital marketing automation software, offering comprehensive affiliate marketing solutions, like Phonexa. It allows for accumulating information about user traffic on the website and the performance of different marketing campaigns.
This data will enable the growth of individual content creators, advertisers, and companies connecting multiple marketers and affiliates.
Best Practices To Build Effective Affiliate Tracking Campaigns
Navigating the complexities of affiliate marketing requires a strategic approach to building effective tracking campaigns. By implementing best practices in affiliate marketing, marketers can optimize performance, maximize conversions, and drive success in the dynamic landscape of affiliate marketing.
Define your Ideal Affiliate
Start by clearly defining the characteristics and qualities you seek in an affiliate partner. Consider factors like audience demographics, niche expertise, and marketing capabilities to ensure alignment with your brand and objectives.
It’s important to use Instagram for affiliate marketing if your target audience is active on this social media network.
Understand the benefits of various marketing channels for affiliate marketing: Explore the strengths and weaknesses of different marketing channels, such as social media, email marketing, and content marketing, to identify the most effective channels for reaching your target audience and driving conversions.
Using the essential metrics for assessing affiliate campaigns’ effectiveness, testing, and optimization: Explore the strengths and weaknesses of different marketing channels, such as social media, email marketing, and content marketing, to identify the most effective channels for reaching your target audience and driving conversions.
Affiliate link tracking is a fundamental tool for marketers on both sites of the affiliate industry – content creators and advertisers. It provides invaluable insights into sales attribution and commission distribution. Beyond its core functionality, it serves as a powerful asset for analyzing site performance, evaluating affiliate partnerships, and refining marketing strategies.
By harnessing the practical benefits of trackable links, marketers can gain deeper insights into campaign effectiveness, optimize content for user engagement, and refine targeting strategies. Leveraging affiliate analytics enables marketers to tailor their approach to their audience, maximize conversions, and streamline their affiliate marketing efforts for greater success.