We're launching an affiliate program soon and am wondering if it would be possible to do all of our tracking through Google Analytics. We already have all of our goals set up through GA so the thought was we would just create a new profile for affiliate and assign goals (e.g., $2 for a new site sign-up, $20 for a new subscriber, etc.). Then we could just log in to Analytics and see how much their tagged links generated in goal amounts and pay them that amount each month. Big problem seems to be with return visits as it seems standard practice to allow repeat (cookied) visits to count within a certain period of time and I do think GA would allow for proper tracking of this. Is that true? Any other considerations here?
I personally wouldn't trust a program that ran it's stats and calculated payouts based on what ever analytics decides to report. I would expect a reputable program to have reliable affiliate software to get accurate readings that is installed on their own servers, or hosting account. Analytics is free, and therefore not liable or responsible for accurate reporting. Tech support sucks, you will never get a real person on the phone if you have discrepancies, and why should they care, you are not paying for accuracy or personalized service. I see nothing but problems from this. If I had a problem with stats and you gave me a report from a free service, I would flip my wig.
Thanks H. Is there a simple service that does something similar to GA? We'd prefer to not drop $10K with CJ or burn a lot of engineering cycles on rolling our own Aff program. GA seems like it might be an easy workaround but perhaps not...