Tracking

Why track? Why indeed!

Well, in my case tracking has shown me what is working and what is crap for my marketing. It’s not as black and white as that but it does show you which road to continue on and which to turn off.

I dare say there are many ways to track your clicks and sales but I use a simple bit of PHP code at the top of all my pages that will send a tracking id to Clickbank (or wherever) so that I can identify where my traffic (and hopefully sales) came from.

Clickbank lets you have upto 24 characters as a tracking code. Here’s an example of a link that may be on your site that goes back to Clickbank.

affiliatenickname.vendorname.clickbank.net?tid=myblogpage1

Breaking this down into its parts we have the affiliate ID, then the vendors product ID, then the end of the normal link ‘clickbank.net’.

It’s the bit after this that is important, the tracking id, in this case it’s ‘myblogpage1′.

An important point here is the ? after the .net bit. This question mark tells any relevant machine that could read this link that it’s a variable, and can (if it want’s) ignore it all together.

anywebsite.com will take you to the same place as anywebsite.com?tid=trackingID

The stuff after the ? is only for info purposes only.

So, I build my tracking links like this  http:/affiliatenick.vendorproduct.clickbank.net?tid=c1a1manw

It’s important to understand that my ?tid variable can be anything I want (upto 24 characters). In my case I go for c1 which is campaign 1. Then the a1 is the article number and the manw bit identifies where my traffic came from, in that case manw means My Article Network.

I have a different number for each campaign, and a different number for each article I write, and then I have code names for whatever vehicle generated the traffic.

Say I had a link to my page on your site, the whole process would go something like this…

http:/LinkToMySite.com?tid=YourSiteName

Someone clicks that link and visits my site and then goes through to clickbank and buys the product I’m recommending. In my Clickbank stats I would see a report that says …

Tracking ID    YourSiteName

Sales 1

I know from this that particular sale originated from your site so I want to keep my link on your site.

Hope you get the picture so far, feel free to contact me if you don’t.

Moving on…

You can set these tracking id’s on all your links. This works ok, but if you are getting traffic from various sources you will need dynamic tracking. This is where PHP comes in.

At the top of all my pages I have this code…

<?php

$trackingcode=$_GET['tid'];

?>

I won’t go into the details of PHP, it’s beyond the scope of this small tutorial. All you need to know is how to replace the relevant bits in the code.  All you should replace is the word ‘trackingcode’, however you can simply copy and paste that into the top of your pages and then see the next bit, how to set up your links.

How to set up your links.

http:/affiliatenick.vendorproduct.clickbank.net?tid=<?php echo $trackingcode;?>

That’s basically it. After the ?tid= in your links you stick this snippet of PHP   <?php echo $trackingcode;?>

What happens is this, a visitor comes to your site with one of your tracking codes stuck on the end of the link. Your page then grabs the tracking code (Get['tid']) and then puts it on the end of any outbound links you have on your page.

This way you can put anything you like as a tracking id on the end of your links in your articles.

I’m sure this is all as clear as mud but I hope I’ve at least opened your eyes to the potential of tracking.

Best regards,

Ron.

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