"Virtual affiliates"?

[miked]

Is there a way to track purchases made for a specific inbound link without having to make up a bunch of affiliates?



Bascially, for ad tracking purposes I'd like to be able to track which ad is producing sales. So while I can track an inbound link by creating a custom landing URL, I can't later track if that inbound link resulted in a sale. The only solution I can see to this is to create a bunch of fake affiliates, and use them to do the tracking.



This will result in a PITA come affiliate payment time, because I would then have to edit the masspay.txt manually. It would also skew the reporting results.



Is there another way?



...Mike

[E-junkie_Guru]

You could add a &custom=UniqueIDHere parameter to the Add to Cart URLs on your custom landing pages, so when a buyer uses any of those buttons to add an item to their cart, that custom value would get passed along with their order and reported in your Transaction Log.

[miked]

The landing URL is an instant redirect to the main page, so this approach won't work. I don't want to have to duplicate my entire site for each ad I want to track!



...Mike

[E-junkie_Guru]

A bit of custom scripting could handle all of this for you, and with that approach you wouldn't even need to set up separate landing pages.



Suppose your main landing page is http://www.yoursite.com/store.php (I'll assume you're scripting in PHP), then when you submit a landing-page URL for your advertising, you'd append a parameter to your URL with a unique value to identify the ad source. E.g., you could make it something like http://www.yoursite.com/store.php?ad=adwords or http://www.yoursite.com/store.php?ad=adsense etc. Then when a user clicks on an ad and lands on your page with that URL, the scripting in your page would look for the value of the ad= parameter in its URL and append that as a custom= value on every Add to Cart button URL on your page, so that value would get included with the order data.



If you're not a programmer who could write this scripting yourself, we can recommend the competent, E-junkie-experienced developers listed in our directory here:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/developer-directory.htm