Help & Resource Center

Affiliate Marketing Tracking

Question

We would like to provide a referral to independent stylists who recommend our products to their clients and buy online. Do you have a plug-in or something for us to track it? Maybe it's a link to our product with some identifier at the end that the recommendation was from that stylist?

Answer

It is actually pretty easy to track referring sites, or really any source such email marketing campaigns, external links, etc. so it can be tracked within Google Analytics. Basically, you need to craft the URL that links to your website to include some special “UTM tags”. These tags are ignored by the website but tell Google Analytics a bunch of important information about the campaign you are running or in your case track these independent stylists.

UTM Tags

There are 5 UTM tags that can be included (examples included below):

  1. Campaign Source: (Required) = FashionBlog
  2. Campaign Medium: (Required) = Website
  3. Campaign Term: = Identifies the paid keyworkds, probably won’t use.
  4. Campaign Content: = You could identify each link and image in the mailer if you really wanted (i.e. Logo, Promo, Product ID, etc. Probably won’t use.
  5. Campaign Name: (Required) = Spring Campaign

URL Builder

There is a really simply online tool you can use to craft these URLs called Google URL Builder.  Simply plug in your values and click on Generate URL.

URL-Builder.png

Google Analytics

Doing this populates Google Analytics with some pretty power data. Not only can you see the traffic that was created by this campaign but you also see how it converted – meaning how much money it made you!

utm-google-analtyics.png


Using this special "UTM tags" takes a little bit of work and practice but will provide you with a wealth of information when used by your affiliates.

Date Created: 01/16/12