[Solved] How to Track ClickBank Vendor Sales

***This is for ClickBank Vendors NOT ClickBank Affiliates***

I've seen this question asked a lot of times over the years here and elsewhere online.

ClickBank provides easy direct tracking for affiliates by simply adding the tid=foobar parameter to your hoplinks. Works pretty good.

For ClickBank vendors thought it's never been so clear cut - how do I track direct sales from my various traffic sources into my own ClickBank products?

The standard workaround is to setup a second pseudo-affiliate account and become your own affiliate enabling you to use standard TID parameter. This does work but it's clunky and separates your earnings between accounts (lowest payout is %1) and screws up LTV calculations etc. In short it's not very elegant and I needed something else.

I'd known for a while about the VTID parameter that ClickBank make available for vendors to use on their buy links. This initially sounds like the the perfect solution but it's limited as you can only use it on payment links on your actual sales pages - it's intended use is for split testing sales pages or your buttons etc.

After some tinkering I finally solved my problem with a combination of the VTID and a free little plugin called Cookie Monster. Here are the steps:

1. Download and install free Cookie Monster plugin
2. In WP Admin>Settings>Cookiemonster add a new url paramter called vtid (you can leave the other options blank)
3. Tweak your ClickBank buy buttons by adding the parameter vtid=[vtid] to the end of the payment URL

e.g. If your payment link/button is currently:

It becomes:

4. Now instead of linking direct to your sales page from your traffic sources or mailings you can add the VTID parameter to your URLs.

e.g. The Only All Access Membership for Pro Marketers- Profit Marketer

Now inside ClickBank Analytics your new VTID will be shown next to all sales that come from that traffic source.

I thought this was a pretty neat solution that doesn't involve any 3rd party trackers - just your site and ClickBank.

I'm not claiming I'm first to solve this, I've seen similar solutions mentioned here before, I felt it was time to document it fully in one place and show how non-tech it can be with the free plugin mentioned.

Now if you're handy with code (or you're not using WordPress) you can of course achieve everything I've described here without the use of the CookieMonster plugin and without WP shortcodes. You can then use the code directly in your templates etc.

NB: This method is in beta, use at your own risk (but it's using tried and trusted concepts that have been around for years)

I've gone into a bit more detail about how to do that on my blog here.