Easy ClickBank Conversion Tracking

In my last post, How To Create EzineArticles-Friendly Affiliate Links, I talked about creating a simple PHP script to install on your web server to redirect visitors to an affiliate link. I briefly showed how to use the ClickBank tracking ID feature to flag which sales came from visitors to that web server. But with a little more work you can create unique tracking IDs that give you a lot more information about where your sales are really coming from. That’s the real key to affiliate marketing success: conversion tracking — determining which sales “funnels” lead to actual sales. Once you know what’s working, you can spend more time and energy (and money, in the case of PPC) on the profitable funnels while abandoning the unprofitable ones.

ClickBank Tracking IDs

As I explained last time, a ClickBank tracking ID is any combination of up to 24 letters and numbers. (It used to be limited to 8 characters, which made what we’re doing here a bit harder to do, but still possible if you were clever.) The tracking ID is appended to the ClickBank hoplink (affiliate link) and passes through ClickBank’s system. If a sale is made, the associated tracking ID (if it was set) shows up in the affiliate’s sales report.

For example, here’s a hoplink with a 5-letter tracking ID:

http://egiguere.burnthefat.hop.clickbank.net?tid=memwg

The tracking ID actually shows up on the ClickBank payment page as part of the affiliate ID. If you click the link above and go through to the payment page, you’ll see this at the bottom:

[affiliate = egiguere.memwg]

You should always test your affiliate links to make sure the tracking ID is being passed correctly.

Note that tracking IDs are not case-sensitive, i.e. “ID001″ is the same as “id001″.

What To Track?

So what should you track? Here are some ideas:

• Date — Knowing when your affiliate link was followed is valuable information. Sometimes the sale happens days or even weeks after the initial visit. For example, if I refer someone to the Rocket Spanish product, they may first sign up for a free 6-day Spanish mini-course before purchasing the full course. So a click that occurred on (say) February 15 might generate a sale a full week later. If I’ve changed promotional methods in the meantime, I might mistakenly attribute the sale to the new promotion, when in fact it was the old one that actually worked.
• Time — Knowing the time of day can also be useful if you’re promoting products via AdWords ads. If the majority of your sales happen late in the day, you can turn off bidding for the other parts of the day and reduce costs by avoiding the tire-kickers.
• Geolocation — The IP address of the visitor can be mapped back to a geographic location. As with the time, this information can aid you in targeting your ads. (See my article What A Website Knows About You.)
• Referrer — When you click a link, browsers normally send the URL of the originating web page (the page the link was on) to the web server. This is called the “referrer” or “referrer header”. Examining the referrer (which the user can prevent the browser from sending, so don’t count on its presence) can tell you the source of that particular click.
• Additional Information — You can embed additional information in the link. For example, AdWords has a keyword insertion feature that lets you automatically insert the keyword that triggered the ad click into the destination URL.

This probably covers 99% of the things you’d want to track via a ClickBank tracking ID.

How To Track?

So how do you track all this information? You can stuff a lot of it into the tracking ID itself, which is my favorite way of doing things. You have 24 characters to work with, so let’s see how we can encode things:

• 4 characters for the date — 2 digits for the day, 2 digits for the month. (Don’t bother with the year, because that only matters at the end or beginning of a year and you should be able to figure out what year the month and day apply to.)
• 4 characters for the time — 2 digits for the hour, 2 digits for the minute.

That takes 8 characters of the 24, leaving us 16 to work with. We could track IP addresses (they can be encoded with 8 characters quite easily) but there’s no point doing it because ClickBank’s sales reports include the buyer’s country.

What can we do with 16 characters, then? How about extracting some useful information about the referrer. Clicks from EzineArticles include the article ID in the referrer URL. Clicks from search engine traffic include the keyword term. Clicks from AdWords ads can also include the keyword term (if you use the special {keyword} syntax in the destination URL) and even information about whether the click originated on the search network or the content network. The possibilities are almost limitless.

Here’s another tip: any information that can’t be stored in the tracking ID itself can still be stored in a file or database.

If there’s interest, I can post a simple tracking script that generates ClickBank tracking IDs with some of this information in it.