As an affiliate marketer, I find it crucial to track my landing page sales results to survive in the ultra-competitive pay per click market. 

Many people use Google analytics to track CPA affiliate offers.  However, with Clickbank and Commission Junction affiliate offers, it is difficult to use Google analytics tracking unless you can get your affiliate partners to put your Google analytic’s tracking code on their webpage that the customer sees after a sale is completed.

Plus, it is no secret that Google is slapping affiliates with high bid prices and low quality scores everyday. By using Google analytics to track your pay per click campaigns you’re giving Google an open invitation to see how much money you’re making on each campaign.  Do your really want to give Google an open invitation to how much you’re earning on each of your pay per click affiliate campaigns?  Not me!-:

I use the below method for tracking my sales conversion for my Commission Junction and Clickbank pay per click affiliate campaigns.  I like to hide the Clickbank hop link so I use a php redirect as you will see below. 

You can use this same method, but you need to make sure your web server has php installed on it in order for it to work.

Here are the steps:

1.  Open a new Windows notepad file and copy & paste the below code in the file.  This code will be used to create a php redirect file with a tracking code, which will redirect your users to your affiliate partner:

<?php
$strKeyword = $_GET[’kw’];
header( ‘Location: http://youraffiliatecode?sid=’. $strKeyword ) ;
?>

2.  Change the http://youraffiliatecode section in the above php code to your Commission Junction or Clickbank affiliate link. In the above code be careful not to erase the ? or anything after the ? sign when you replace your affiliate link.

3.  If your offer is a Clickbank affiliate link change the ?sid portion of the link to ?tid. Otherwise if you’re doing a Commission Junction affiliate link the above will work fine because sid is used for tracking in Commission Junction.

4.  Choose file Save As and save the above file you created naming it something relevant to your affiliate program.  When saving the file make sure in the file name box you add a .php extension to the end of the file. 

For instance you could save the file as superaffiliate.php.  After you save your file you should notice in Windows Explorer that the file type is called php.  If you see it is a text file then you have not added the .php to the end of the file name when you saved it.

5.  Ftp the created php file to your web server. 

Ok, now that you have created the php redirect file you will use it as the link on your landing page anytime you want someone to visit your affiliate partner.  Anytime a link on your landing page is clicked the above php redirect file will redirect the user automatically to your affiliate partner with your affiliate link. 

Next you need to set up your landing pages.  Landing pages can be done in html, htm or php it does not matter.  For this example let’s take a look at 3 landing pages and how to track the sales results of each of them.

On each landing page when you want to direct the user to your affiliate you simply have to add a parameter to your link for tracking the landing page.

Here is how the link would look:

<a href=”http://yoursite.com/superaffiliate.php?kw= GoogSa1”>Anchor Text</a>

In the above link, you would change the superaffiliate.php to whatever you named the file you created above and the http://yoursite.com/ to your sites actual URL.

Notice the parameter added to the url ?kw=GoogSa1.  The GoogSa1 is how to track your landing page sales.  You can change the GoogSa1 portion of the code to whatever you want (for clickbank affiliate links keep it to 8 characters or less).  It simply identifies which landing page you are tracking.  I selected GoogSa1 to tell me this landing page will run on Google Adwords (Goog) and it is my first version of the super affiliate landing page (Sa1).

Each time you get a sale from the above landing page, it will report in your Clickbank or Commission Junction account with a tracking code of GoogSa1.  That is how you know which landing page is selling the most.

Your next step is to create different versions of the landing page above so you can see how changes to the landing page impact your sales.  So when you make a second and third version of the above landing page you can simply change the tracking code from GoogSa1 to GooSa2 and GoogSa3. 

Also once you create 3 versions you can copy each version and set it up for pay per click campaigns on MSN, and Yahoo.  You simply need to change the tracking portion of the url to reflect those engines.  So for your copied version of landing page 1 your tracking code may be MSNSa1.  For landing page 2 and 3, it would be MSNSa2 and MSNSa3.

I hope you are seeing the power of how tracking gives you real time statistics on the landing pages that are generating sales from your pay per click campaigns.  Not only are you seeing which sales letter works the best, but you are also seeing which pay per click search engine (MSN, Google or Yahoo) is generating higher sales.

Once you start tracking your sales and landing page conversions you can really start to separate your profitable campaigns from the losers and dominate your competition.

In the near future, I will be doing another post to show you how to make a minor change to the above method to track which keywords in your pay per click campaign are generating the most sales.

Stay tuned!

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