7+ Best Methods to Track Affiliate Campaigns: Campaign Kickstarter

Are you an affiliate marketer who is stuck in saturation of affiliate income not growing? Then this article is for you. In this article, we have mentioned 7+ Best methods to track affiliate campaigns while giving you an in-depth analysis and the reasons you can asses the various reasons.

Affiliate marketing is going nowhere. But where are you standing in terms of the revenue model? Well, many aspirational affiliates join this industry, but only a few of them survive. The main reason behind it is that affiliates start their marketing efforts but fail to track them. 

A proper assessment is always required about any affiliate campaign through which you can know how the campaign is going and understand what you are earning from it. Though many types of affiliate marketing do have the same objective of making revenue, the main fact is how you get along. 

So in this article, we are going share various methods through which you can track your affiliate campaigns. 

Why is Affiliate Tracking Important?

Affiliate marketing is critical for the success of your Affiliate Campaigns. Let us explain to you how. As affiliate marketing is almost performance-based, the better you perform, the more you can earn! 

The better your affiliate marketing efforts, the more you can make. So the effectiveness of your campaigns is going to determine your performance. A larger assessment of this performance can help you change your strategy if it fails and can even make you a more successful affiliate in the longer run. 

To know the performance of the affiliate marketing program, it is essential to manage and reward participants in the affiliate networks efficiently. An affiliate tracking software can help you to judge the performance of your campaigns and reveal critical insights about what's working and what aspects to improve on. 

This software can be hosted on their own servers or even run on Saas Cloud. Through them, you can capture page views and clicks of promotional content along with tracking the affiliate conversions

7+ Best Methods to Track Affiliate Campaigns

To track various user behaviors, you require different affiliate marketing tracking techniques, which are mentioned below. Let's have a quick look at those.

Cookie Tracking

It is among the most common ways to track an affiliate campaign. Many internet users might be aware of cookies which are new prompts that appear whenever we visit a new website or blog. 

These cookies are made to know the behaviors of users, particularly those who visit a website more than once. So what's a great deal in it? Well, they allow merchants to track what data has been collected for the past two months. And that's a major reason why most of the affiliate cooperations do set-up intervals of 2 months. 

Among the major drawbacks of this type of tracking is that every user can delete them from their browsers. Also, you cannot track the same user's activity occurring from multiple devices. 

2. Postback URL Tracking

Postback URL Tracking

Often regarded as among the most accurate ways to track an affiliate campaign, well, if being honest, for a few affiliate marketers, it is also considered one of the best methods to track affiliate campaigns. This way is known to be privacy-friendly and, at the same time, a more reliable method to track affiliate activity. It works on the server-to-server pattern, which ensures that nothing is being cleared off.

It ensures that nothing is being wiped off, which in case designates the fact that you get accurate and in-depth data. So merchants who use several affiliate networks should consider using this technique.

As the affiliate network offers you a unique advertiser's URL called an ID, it is already added to the merchant's URL. This is automatically updated as soon as the user reaches a given landing page. Though that's a bit more complex, it ensures that your results are guaranteed and accurate. Many experts recommend it to be better than the Cookie tracking method.

3. Impression Tracking

This method is an actively involved one where you can check out various statistics about each link or banner to users. It is also known as the View track. Here the amount is paid even if the users do not directly click on the ad. The information is sourced with the help of cookies. These cookies know which advertisements are displayed to the buyer.

With this information, you can know why users do not want to click on your banners or links. And if things are not going the way you wanted, this information can be more than handy in improving your overall campaign performance.

4. Pixel Tracking: Best Methods to Track Affiliate Campaigns

Pixel Tracking as one of the best methods to track affiliate campaigns

The marketing pixels are those tiny snippets of codes through which you can fetch information about visitors on a website, and you can check out how they browse, what type of ads they click on, and various other information. With these pixels, you can easily enable affiliates to track conversions in their own affiliate tracking platform. As an affiliate marketer that works on all the different segments of marketing, pixel tracking is indeed a tracking process with better and segregated data, and it won't be wrong if we consider pixel tracking as one of the best methods to track affiliate campaigns.

These pixels can be iFrame, Image Pixels, JavaScript, or Postback URLs. With this information, you can even send the user paid ads which can likely bring out conversions. It can help you to measure a marketing campaign's performance, track conversions, and build an audience base. These codes are easy to integrate, and you can add them to any page that drives conversions.

5. Affiliate Fingerprint Tracking

Affiliate Fingerprint Tracking

Fingerprint tracking uses metadata identifiers on a click-through which you can monitor and match the consumer's actions, and there you can request more information and send it back to the affiliate. This is more kind of information sharing where a digital signature will be produced from your end device during this tracking process.

It covers basic details like the end device, its OS, Language, and also the type/version of the browser. Using all this information is going to give you a measurement guess of your campaign's performance and will even allow you to reward partners for their contribution.

6. Per Product Tracking

This type of tracking is handier for users who have to offer different commissions. So here, as the name goes, you can track products separately. This eliminates any confusion about commissions being offered.

Even it allows you to customize depending on your own needs like you can do it for a specific product category.

7. IP Affiliate Tracking

This method is a fairly tricky one and is used in two scenarios:

  • When cookies cannot be found 
  • When users have a Flash Player installed 

Though this is infrequent, but can happen. When users have to monitor the sales process, this platform will search for the last click from a known IP address. And when the affiliate network locates such clicks, then a specific affiliate ID will be added to the affiliate through which they can receive their money. 

8. Action Tracking

As the name goes, this method is full of actions where you can follow all the steps that your client is taking. You can know whether they have clicked a link or even watched a video till the end and much more.

It even helps you to analyze the client's behavior on the website, like if they have visited the recommendation section or have they read the product description and more. In short, this method is best if you have to study the entire consumer behavior at all stages.

Benefits of using an Affiliate Tracking Software

Now that you know the various types of affiliate tracking methods, it's time to understand what benefits it has. These benefits will allow you to understand more about what affiliate tracking software has to offer. 

The ominous benefit that you get by using this software is that it makes tracking affiliate campaigns easier; you can easily check out all the key insights about your marketing campaign.

1. Understand Deeper Insights about Affiliate Campaigns

Just like SEO, Affiliate marketing Optimization does require a lot of data. And these tools are just ideal for getting key metrics about campaigns by allowing you to get customizable and detailed reporting. You can also check out which audience to target and also the ad networks.

2. Optimizing Marketing Campaigns

The data offered by these tools will help you to understand where your campaigns are going well and where it needs improvements. And with this data, you can optimize your campaigns and improve their performance to get more revenue.

3. Makes Campaign more Economical

By properly analyzing your campaign, you can check out how the expenditure is going. You can also eliminate the wastage of spending on campaigns which can save you money and make your campaigns more economical.

4. Increases Productivity of the Affiliate Campaigns

Finally, from the data offered by affiliate tracking software, you can optimize and increase the productivity of your campaigns which sources you fantastic revenue.

🔥 Also read: Top 6 Affiliate Marketing Tracking Software (With Reviews)

Top FAQs on Methods to Track Affiliate Campaigns

What is affiliate marketing tracking software?

The affiliate marketing tracking software allows you to track all the activities related to affiliate campaigns under one dashboard. It offers vital insights about the affiliate campaign through which your merchants can understand the campaign better and learn how things are going on. In short, helps to streamline the process of monitoring traffic and conversions.

How to track affiliate sales?

The affiliate marketers get a unique link which is also known as the Unique ID or the Affiliate ID. When affiliates place these links on their websites or landing pages and receive clicks, they can get a commission which is their revenue. Of course, as the sales are made, you get the commission.

How long does a cookie last?

Typically, in the affiliate industry, the cookie period is 30-60 days time frame. At the same time, some merchants make the cookie last for the session only, whereas some of them offer 999-day cookies or even lifetime cookies.

Which is the best affiliate tracking software?

In our opinion, cookies alone are becoming inconvenient and not accurate. So we recommend you go for the best affiliate tracking tools that actually have cross-platform cookies tracking through which you can ensure robust affiliate tracking and ensure that you are getting the right amount of revenue.

Final Verdict: Why Should You Track Affiliate Campaigns? 

Now that we have discussed the various methods to track affiliate campaigns, it becomes highly critical that we understand why you should track your affiliate campaigns. Firstly, to make an affiliate campaign successful, you need to ensure that your campaign performs the best in the way you want. For that, you require a strategy that can achieve this goal. And that's precisely where these platforms come into play.

They offer you all the information about the affiliate campaigns through which you can know about how the campaign is performing and let allows you to optimize it and make it even more effective. After all, affiliate marketing can be tedious at times, so why not prefer a robust strategy through which you track your affiliate campaigns and make them more fruitful?

We hope you like our guide on various methods to track affiliate campaigns.

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Sally
Sally

Sally Simard is a passionate content writer and blogger for a long while. She loves to talk and likes sharing her knowledge in various domains, including the latest technology, dropshipping, online marketing, make money online, affiliate marketing, and many more. She is venerated for her research skills, organizational skills, & flexibility, making her the cornerstone of AffTweaks.

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