For those of you who are into article marketing: I'm looking for a way to back-track which articles are generating which sales. I've been fiddling around with Analytics, but I haven't had much luck getting that exact information. There are some CB sales tracker plugins out there, but I'd prefer not using such a thing, since sales shaving might ensue. So, how do you figure out which of the articles you've published on directories are making sales? Is there a simple script I can use to get a log with referral URL /date everytime the website is accessed from an article directory?
use tracking ids (tids) so your hoplink is probably //xxx.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/. just add a ?tid= at the end and put in a tracking value. for instance, xxx.vendor.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=tzarticle1. if anyone clicks on that, it'll show up in CB analytics as tzarticle1. make sure your tids do not have any spaces, symbols (-, .), and it's just STRAIGHT text.
Of course I'm using tracking ID's in all my affiliate links... but those only provide me with data about the traffic from my landing page to the vendor's sales page (hops data). I'm looking for a way to organize referral data, i.e. information on the traffic flow from my directory articles to my landing pages, specifically. I can get this information from cystats or analytics, but it's not in a useful format... meaning I can't look up which article originated a sale. I might be able to get this information from cpanel's awstats, but it won't be practical doing so. I once heard of a simple tracking script that one could set up in a landing page that would record a log on the server, with timestamp and referral for every incoming hit. Any of you php wizzes knows this?
Hey, have you tried something like getclicky ,chartbeat, statcounter, woopra, piwick, sitemeter to name the most popular ones. best regards
ah, i see. since you already have analytics, you know you can send tracking parameters to your LP? examples: yoururl.com/?utm_campaign=cbvendor&utm_source=ezine+how+to+make+money&utm_medium=referral yoururl.com/?utm_campaign=cbvendor&utm_source=articlesbase+how+to+make+money&utm_medium=referral then you can set up goals that track their clicks on your affiliate link: < a href="http://affiliatelink.com/?tid=sidebanner" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview("/G1/affiliate");" > http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=72712 < -more info on that then you'll get a very clear picture of which articles are sending traffic that click on your affiliate links. if you want to take the custom route like server logging, check out this guide: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Tracking-Website-Statistics-with-PHP/ you'll need some knowledge on MySQL and PHP. either way, i still prefer analytics.
This sound a lot like an apache server log file. It will contain every hit and the referral for that hit. Do you have access to the raw web server log files?
raw access logs? That actually makes good sense. I just downloaded, and I'm looking for some kind of software that'll help me sort thought it. I also just realized how awesome google analytics really is, and that's probably the only tool I'll ever need to get this critical data.