How to Use Clickbank Tracking Ids
When Clickbank added the feature of tracking ids to affiliate links, a lot of affiliates breathed a sigh of relief. I know I did. Up to that point, I had used used seperate affiliate accounts to track sales. One for advertising and one for natural search results. It was the only way to track the return on investment I was getting for the money I was throwing at pay per click advertising. Add this opened up the possibility of tracking hits down to the keyword to squeeze even more out the money I was spending.
Selling items online can only go so far without tracking. In order for you to know what works, you need to know where sales come from. That way you can stop wasting time on efforts that do not make you money. You can also use your tracking as insight on any new ideas you may have.
Let’s say you have a blog, you have an email list, and you are using PPC advertising. You are promoting the same product through each. Advertising costs you money. A list that you send newletters to may cost a minimal amount and the time to write the newsletter. Blogging only costs you time for the most part. But if you are short on either time or money, you need to make a decision of where to use these resources. Tracking helps you make that decision.
You can see you made 7 sales from the blog in the last week, 15 from your list, and 20 from your advertising. Now depending on how much time and money you spent on each, you can discover where your time or money is better spent. I started affiliate marketing with very little of either. But by tracking, I could make better use of both. And with time, I had to work less outside the home and was making more money, so I had more to spend on advertising. Your online effort will build if you are smart, giving you more of both time and money.
I can’t really pretty up the technical details. So here is a quote from Clickbank:
The format of the hoplink URL with a tracking code is located below.
http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=XXXXXXXX
The tracking code (which is "XXXXXXXX" in the example above) can be 8 characters long, containing alpha and numeric characters only. Any tracking code longer than 8 characters will be truncated. Any tracking code containing characters other than alpha or numeric values will have the entire tracking code removed from the hoplink and order process and will not show in the transaction report. Tracking codes received with upper and lower case characters will be set to all uppercase.
This leaves you lots of options. You could make your tracking id the name of your newsletter and the date is was sent, like ‘dpr1107′. Or you could tag your links with the page on your site that it came from such as ‘index2′. Then when you check Clickbank for your sales, you can go to Reporting->Analytics and see how many sales came from either link.
For those of you more technically inclined, here are the details of the system I use to track. It is something I hacked together, but I am working on putting it all together so that readers here can download it and install it on their sites. I built this tracking system for Adwords so that I can track sales to the specific keyword and can know when certain keywords were just not worth pursuing.
First you need to use dynamic keyword insertion in your Adwords ads as explained by Tim Schroeder. This will add the keywords to the end of your destination url. But most keywords will be longer than eight digits, so you will have to get tricky. You will have to write a script to save the keyword to the database, generate a id for it, and then use the id to send on to Clickbank for tracking. You may want to save date, time, and other data for any future uses you may have for them.
Tracking ids defnitely make things a lot easier and help you squeeze more money out of Adwords.
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How do we create these tracking codes?
Alexs last blog post..Keyword Elite - Is It The Best Keyword Research Tool ?
They can be anything you want them to be. That part is up to you.
This is very helpful Stephan. In response to Alex and anyone else wondering:
You don’t need to register a tracking id at the clickbank site. For instance, if you want one of your tracking id’s to be “ezine1″, you just need to add it to your clickbank affiliate link and clickbank will automatically track it.
Rons last blog post..Why Membership Sites are the Wave of the 21st Century
Thanks Ron, didn’t see the question.
This article is complete crap. It explains nothing about tracking IDs and your information is out of date. Clickbank can now have up to 24 characters long in their tracking ID.
And looking at the date of the post, it is.