Analytics - Tracking the conversions

[John Callaghan]

Sorry if this is an overly easy question....my webmaster is on vacation and I'm trying to figure something out.

I've got a bunch of sites all sending traffic to amazon generating affiliate sales (not as much as I'd like but it's headed in the right direction). Now that it's starting to grow I'm trying to do some tuning but don't have the necessary information.

Each site has multiple links pointing toward Amazon. Is there anyway for me to tell from a Google Analytics of Awstats report exactly which of those links generated the click through?

Also, our Amazon account is setup with only one tracking id. Would we have been better off setting up one tracking id for each site that could send traffic to Amazon? At least then I'd be able to get some reasonable information from Amazon. As it is now it's pretty much impossible to tell where the traffic is coming from (or at least we don't know where to look)

Any help would be greatly appreciated

John

[Marty Foley]

Originally Posted by John Callaghan

Each site has multiple links pointing toward Amazon. Is there anyway for me to tell from a Google Analytics of Awstats report exactly which of those links generated the click through?

Also, our Amazon account is setup with only one tracking id. Would we have been better off setting up one tracking id for each site that could send traffic to Amazon? At least then I'd be able to get some reasonable information from Amazon. As it is now it's pretty much impossible to tell where the traffic is coming from (or at least we don't know where to look)

John,

Here's one way to track outgoing links as a conversion goal in Google Analytics:
Tracking an external link as a goal - Analytics Help

That's a good step because it helps you track micro-conversions (smaller goals leading to macro-conversions, or more important goals). At least that let's you know which keywords are getting people to go through your affiliate links on your own site.

Next step would be (as you know) is to track which of the keywords (or pages, or ads) that get people to click your affiliate links actually end up as sales.

Ideally you want to track each conversion by the specific keyword/page/ad which triggered it.

See # 5 of this FAQ page to get unique tracking ID's for Amazon affiliate links:
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com.../join/faq.html

Some affiliate systems make tracking easier by letting you pass unique tracking ID's in affiliate links, so you can quickly and easily track conversions down to the specific keyword, ad, or web page level. With them you can setup unique links for every keyword in a list of thousands, such as in Adwords campaigns.

And you can use some spreadsheet tricks to automatically add sequential numbers to affiliate tracking ID's in bulk

The fact that you have to request unique tracking ID's from Amazon is just one more hurdle to making this easy.

Marty Foley ~ Traffic and Conversion Mad Scientist

[Tom Oxby]

Hi John
You are permitted up to 100 tracking ID's with Amazon. At a minimum do have one tracking ID for each site so at least you know where the sale originated. By looking at your Amazon stats you can also see the type of links that are generating sales.

For example I have a unique tracking ID for one of my sites and a visitor made a purchase of that product so obviously that particular link is successful. However frequently someone will use one of the links on the site and purchase an unrelated product and I have no idea which link generated the sale so it is not a perfect system.

[John Callaghan]

Excellent tips, thanks guys!

This will get me pointed in the right direction.