Okay, after going though my initial "Baptisim by Fire" of reading though a lot of STM posts on both advice and mistakes I should avoid, I am close to setting up my first big plunge.
I am in the process negotiate with an advertiser with a good, safe product with a good payout.
If this is successful, I will have a competitive advantage in the sense that I will not be competing against all the other affiliates out there.
The thing is that they don't have Cake or anything like that and they have given me a javascript scrolling host and post form to embed into my landing pages. Basically, I get an email whenever there is a conversion. They said they will invest in Cake or something more professional if some of the early trials with me are successful.
I have been playing around with this host and post form.
- I can track keywords and other data that come to my landing page, but I don't know how I can use this info to optimise since I would like to match this info against the conversion that will result.
- There is no thank you page, essentially when the user completes the form, the javascript form says "thank you, user" but this does not take the user to a new page where a conversion pixel could be placed.
1. Has anyone had any similar experiences?
2. What is the best way to do match the conversion against all the traffic data collect? Can I pass these data and variables to the host an post form and somehow link that up with the advertisers' conversion data?
The advertiser is open to working with me to make this happen if this is easy/cheap to do.
I believe the best approach would be collecting all your query string data and using POST to send it to the advertiser along with the form info.
They should then be able to send you data for the converting users and you can upload click IDs to reconcile everything.
The other option would be them using a postback URL to fire off to your tracking system - this could be very easily done with a PHP script that gets called by them from submitted user data... e.g. a user converts, they have some code somewhere which says call postback.php?clickid={clickID that you passed via POST}.
Alternatively, you could use some javascript to log this data to a CSV file when users click the submit button by using an onClick event.