Lets say you are promoting an affiliate product and have many different links pointing to the landing (promotion) page. Is there anyway to actually tell what link resulted in the affiliate sale? Obviously easy to tell where the visitors came from on my page. I am just trying to find out which links are converting best with the affiliate sales inorder to duplicate those marketing techniques.
Most affiliate networks have sub-id feature where you assign a unique id to click URL for each web site you are promoting on. They report back which sub-id's are successful and which are not.
If you want to get crazy, you can also setup redirects to run the traffic across your site first, but it's a bit of work. I agree that sub-id's are the way to go if you can.
Analytics software can track that. Or you can use sub-ids (campaigns) provided by the affiliate program. Or track outgoing links with a PHP link cloaking script.
Google Analytics and Stastcounter will show you the source... The company SalesAnnual.com are great at automation referral and affiliate programs, as well as promoting them. _____________________ we design stuff that sells!