Home > Technical & Creative Skills > Tracking Campaigns

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Why not just use Google Analytics for affiliate tracking? (18)

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I currently use Prosper202 for Facebook affiliate campaigns and am happy with it, but recently I've been learning a lot of GA tactics for tracking my ecommerce sites at a granular level and also for adwords/PLA campaigns.

But that got me thinking, what really are the big pros of using affiliate tracking software instead of just using Google Analytics?

You could track campaigns via utm_parameters: http://orbitmedia.com/blog/google-analytics-url-builder

And you could supply any third-party with a conversion pixel to track leads/sales: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1006230

One thing I'm thinking of doing is automating this entire process using Google Spreadsheet's API (https://developers.google.com/google-apps/spreadsheets), so that I'll have my click costs, total ad spend, and ROI for campaigns all calculated just like affiliate tracking software does. And instead of having to manually update my CPC costs all the time, I'll simply scrape that data from whatever traffic source I'm using so that's automated too.

I guess this is hard to do if you're not a developer, so affiliate tracking software is an awesome out-of-the-box solution. And it's very geared towards what we do. But apart from UI and look/feel, are there any compelling advantages?

GA is high-performance, can be used everywhere, and it offers a lot of useful metrics (bounce rate, time spent on landing page, user demographics, etc) that you can't get anywhere else. And you could do a lot of powerful things with its event tracking.

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Is server-to-server conversion tracking possible? If not then GA is not so useful to many.

The interface is not sensibly built for an affiliate marketer.

Platforms like CPV Lab, p202, Voluum, are built for paid traffic AM and it shows in how easy it is to make campaigns and interpret data.

I'm sure you could mess with GA to get to some solution, but is it really going to be worth it?

GA may be high performance but I would trust a well optimised server and CPV Lab or Voluum long before I would use GA.

As for it's useful metrics... not so useful. Bounce rate is basically 100% - CTR. Time spent on page can be tracked with some systems but when you care about that insight you are likely using something like ClickTale which is more feature rich than GA.

User demographics aren't really that useful to a paid marketer since they are likely targeting these, and so can see the corresponding data, or can't target them so don't care. Unless GA could pull user demo and let you redirect automatically based on that... I don't see the utility.

All in all, GA is an analytical platform for websites. Most affiliates want a click tracking system. There is some crossover but they are built to excel at specific things.

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Thanks for the detailed reply. You could hack the Google conversion pixel as a postback url for server-to-server conversion tracking, but yeah I see what you're saying. Could end up being a lot of work, but for marginal gains.

Interesting... I'll check out ClickTale! For redirecting based on user demo, you'd need to hack up a script for that too.

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Could you really make things server side? From what I have seen, there is a PHP class you can use but i'm not sure if it just makes the pixel become a server-side injection into the page.

The main issue is, does GA have the potential to support tracking based on unique click IDs for every user - because this is the only reliable way to track completely server side.

You could do interesting things if GA gave you API access that could be interfaced through PHP or something else completely server-side.

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GA does track based on unique clicks and it does it out-of-the-box with ecommerce tracking (http://cutroni.com/blog/2008/01/13/g...-how-it-works/) and also conversion pixels if you're running Adwords campaigns. But if you really want to store a unique click ID and track it on your own, then you could set a custom variable for that click.

Right now, when I get any sales on my sites I could trace everything about that click/visitor and I also have goals/funnels set up to see what their flow was when they first came to my site and eventually made a purchase. My stores are hosted on Shopify, so whenever it processes a sale on their server, a GA pixel on my checkout page fires off and records the transaction in my reports. It's pretty badass.

When you mentioned server-side, what I was thinking of is how you would supply a post-back url to your ad network. That might need a little hack. But you could supply your ad network with a tracking pixel/script instead pretty easily: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722054?hl=en (Track conversions on a website >> Paste the code in your website's HTML)

Still like you said though, a lot of tweaks and work might need to be done to make it comparable to something like Voluum or CPVLabs. And another thing I just realized, when you submit a new domain to GA it could take up to 24hrs to process before you can see any analytics data. So that's a big con if you need to test a campaign on a new domain right away.

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GA does have an API, which is the main reason these ideas have been marinating in my head: https://developers.google.com/analyt...ides/reporting

Here's the PHP client for it: https://code.google.com/p/php-ga

But I love the fact that Voluum has an API... that really intrigues me and I wish the other affiliate tracking softwares did too.

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We find GA is slow and grossly inaccurate.

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For this to be more viable cf. affiliate tracking systems you need to move everything server-side...

Not talking unique clicks, but rather unique IDs/hashes for every visit and no involvement of javascript and client-side stuff.

This seems to be available via their low-level measurement protocol - https://developers.google.com/analyt.../devguide#page - and I presume this is how php-ga works?

Placing a javascript/image pixel with the advertiser is simply not an acceptable solution - too many advertisers support S2S postbacks only and this obviously cannot be achieved with client side stuff like javascript tracking codes.

All in all, you could probably do it, but it's too much effort when there are better systems out there specifically for paid traffic, and for the most part the GA platform is simply not as practical to the affiliate marketer running campaigns on FB, mobile, display, etc.

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Old thread came up on search.

I use GA on nearly everything. Grab yourself a piece of jQuery that traps outbound clicks and send them to GA as an event. Then set up a conversion goal on that event.

What you get is immediate insight into click fraud. As to the accuracy comment earlier in the thread: Some CDN's allow you to "inject" GA code into your page as it passes through. I highly recommend you check out CloudFlare for this purpose.

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Sounds interesting as I find click fraud to be a major issue, depending on the traffic source. Can you be a bit more specific on what you're doing to trap links via jQuery?

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Here's how you do it with universal analytics:


$(document).on('mousedown', 'a', function () {
if ((this.protocol === 'http:' || this.protocol === 'https:') && this.hostname.indexOf(document.location.hostname) === -1) {
ga('send', 'event', 'outbound click', this.hostname, this.href);
}
});

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@theboss - I'm having a brain fail here - sounds very interesting, but I'm not quite getting what metrics you see from this.

Can you explain a little more?

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Certainly. What I get in GA is an event that converts into a goal. From that I can view all kind of reports such as viewing the goal conversion rate (in this case the goal is clicking through the lander)

NOTE: you are also getting this from your tracker. This is simply an easy/free method and a good second opinion.

I've attached a pic to show you some obvious click fraud coming from a referer on an unoptimized initial buy.

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I am using GA for tracking clicks in a page. I am able to set up click tracking and I can see the real time data in the G reporting panel. BUT, I am not able to fetch the report from "Behavior" -> Events -> Top Events page.

Would GA takes time to update the reports?

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The biggest problem with GA is that according to T&C you are not allowed to use them for tracking INDIVIDUAL users, you can use them to view aggregated and anonymous data. Of course, it's up to you, whether you'll follow Google rules or not. But Analytics are made to be good for visualizing aggregated data. That is, they're the best for stuff like bounce rate, time spent on page, grouping by source type, contingency tables (table with two dimensions) etc. Actually, if I can recommend you just one single thing, then learn how to use and read contingency tables in GA because it can provide you such specific and useful information like nothing else.

If you want to track single clicks, it gets more difficult and you are also breaking Google's T&C. Most solutions use some sort of click ID (CID)/affiliate click ID (ACID) or similar.

Yes you can do that and I personally actually use it. utm_campaign is campaign name (e.g. "trafficsource_country"), utm_medium is medium type (e.g. "ppc") and utm_source is the specific source (e.g. "trafficsource_sitename"). Then all you have to do is setup event triggers and goals and you're good to go. It's definitely possible.

But for some things, it is also very good to use something like P202.

I just checked and I'm able to see the events in both real time data and "Top events". In "Top events" I see events from last hour, not this hour. If you don't see anything there, then your tracking may be broken.

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Delayed, not accurate, no click detail. We use it but for owned and operated properties. Not marketing.

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I think GA is more sensible for pages that have organic traffic e.g. from search and direct referrals, where you want a birds eye overview of traffic, where it comes from, bounce rates, pages visited, etc.

For advertising and paid traffic there are a dozen systems better designed for that.

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GA is good for property sites as @Smax says, not for affiliate marketing as speed is everything.

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