Using internal URL parameters to properly track info content conversions

[bernard]

I was thinking about this:

How do I know what my info content contributes to in sales?

I do try to lead visitors to product pages from my info pages. I can see outgoing clicks in Analytics on the Landing Page report, so I have some idea of how many clicks and thus aprox value, but it's obviously not precise.

I'm thinking again:

Wouldn't it be as simple as linking with a parameter in an internal link? Link to http://example.com?ref=infocontentpage? Wouldn't that in most cases show up in affiliate stats?

I've tried to this with a script for Adwords. If someone lands on a PPC page from Adwords and they click on to another page, then I add the gclid as a parameter to the new internal site. I filter outgoing links with some regex, so that the gclid doesn't get added to stuffit shouldn't.

 

[ryandiscord]

To be honest, I'm not sure I follow what your question is but I am curious as to what you're doing here.

Are you passing a parameter containing an identifier of your landing page into the affiliate link?

for example a user's path starting at your info page, then visits a product page, then an affiliate link would be something like: example.com/info-page > example.com/product-page?ref=infocontentpage > affiliate link. Then you're referencing it in your affiliate link reports?

Also your passing gclid to that page too? Does that gclid pass to Google Ads or are you cross referencing that in your affiliate link reports?

 

[bernard]

To be honest, I'm not sure I follow what your question is but I am curious as to what you're doing here.

Are you passing a parameter containing an identifier of your landing page into the affiliate link?

for example a user's path starting at your info page, then visits a product page, then an affiliate link would be something like: example.com/info-page > example.com/product-page?ref=infocontentpage > affiliate link. Then you're referencing it in your affiliate link reports?

Also your passing gclid to that page too? Does that gclid pass to Google Ads or are you cross referencing that in your affiliate link reports?

Yes to everything.

For Google Ads, I cross reference my sales in my affiliate reports and use Offline Conversion Tracking with a Google Sheet (upload order details along with gclid passed to affiliate report with a url variable).

Since I have rather high CPC and high EPC, I need to get as many sales coming from Google Ads tracked correctly to understand my ROI. Miss one sale and that's a lot of wrong data. So I make sure that gclid is tracked cross page.

That was what led to me to ponder if this couldn't give me some extra actionable data, by connecting affiliate sales, not by last page but first page. It would certainly be more correct and give some data to work with regarding funneling from info to product.

 

[ryandiscord]

Very cool, I wasn't aware of the offline conversion tracking.

It would also be cool to pass your traffic and campaign details over too. I did something sort of like this with amazon affiliate links a while back. The script might be similar to what you're doing already.