How many people here have no idea where their sales are coming from?
 

I am curious. How many of you just do a lot of work, check stats and are happy to get signups but dont know which one of your traffic sources is producing the sale?

I recently signed up to a lot of affiliate programs and how in the hell do you guys track your stats ? I see some programs provide campaigns but not all of them. Some just show , # hits and # sales and that's it... wtf ?

Even the sites that offer campaigns, you have to log into each program, create a new campaign, fix your links, for each traffic source. So you have a linklist with 100 programs and 1000s of sites on it, and you have 10 different traffic sources, that could take weeks editing all those links. There is no way you have any idea if google does better for you vs yahoo, or msn, or if you buying bulk from someone, how do you know if you are making or losing money on the deal ???? this is insaine. how do people do business like this ?

This is new to me because in the past, for the most part I have used clickcash which gives you the url the person signed up from, their ip, hell I even get to see what type of browser the person is using (which is nice in calculating how much you losing to spyware agents). Or I have used ibill for my own sites (before they went to shit) and I was able to track my own campaigns. When i have used other companies in the past usually it was on 1 site for 1 traffic source so it wasn't a big deal.

Two ways to fix this problem:

In the affiliate stats show the ip address of the signups or in the affiliate stats show the full url of the page the signup cam from with some type of dynamic subid= on the end that we can put to anything. If i want to subid=campaign1 whatever i can do this on my end without having to log into your program and creating a new "campaign".

If anyone else has any suggestions please share. I am surprised it is 2007 and there hasn't been a solution for this yet or more people demanding something be done to make things better. If affiliate companies don't want to offer extensive stats tracking fine, just give me the damn ip and i can do all the programming on my end to track everything. By allowing me to see the ip on the signups it would take me about 30 seconds to set up stuff on my end to track 100,000 different affiliate programs, all the way down to each exact source it came from, and know exactly where each signup came from. It's not that hard to do at all.

So why wont affiliate programs provide this information to their affiliates. If we know what works and what doesn't which would allow us to get a better ROI and maximize the traffic that works the best, don't ya think that benefits you too ?

I have two sponsors that send me checks every month and I have NO idea where the sales are coming from....I spent a few hours one night trying every way I could to trace them, with no luck

the stats to these sponsors don't give any clue, no referring url, nothing.....so, as much as I appreciate the money, I would love to know what I did right in this case to multiply it, but I can't

Is that such an unreasonable request ? Referral url would be nice especially if it has a subid= anything on t he end. You would know right away which site was making you those sales AND traffic source was making those sales and you could increase like you said, making that company more money as well.

Why is it such a big deal to show just a little bit more data? If the program is getting 100,000 signups a day, is logging 100,000 referring urls or ips going to eat up that much more DB space and if so and you making 100,000 signups i think you can afford to buy a few more database servers.

my mistake all affiliates must know exactly where all of their signups come from or they just don't care.

I agree, stats areas are horrid. Very few sponsors even track direct join page links, much less referring URLs. It wouldn't take much coding to have a really detailed stats area like ClickCash (even though I hate them) they did have one of the best stats reporting around.

Who needs tracking? Just guess, it's WAY more fun! :thumbsup

been this way for a long time. a change would be nice.

in some cases depending on your signups times the $$ amount that you are getting paid per signup. that can varry depending on signup ratio too.

Why has it been this way for a long time when there is such an easy solution to the problem?

I have a sponsor I barely promote who one day last week, completely out of the blue, started registering thousands of hits each day and giving me 3-4 sales each day.

I couldn't find out where the hits were coming from due to their sucky stats.

After several days the hits went down by half, then again by half the next day, and now traffic is back to about 50 hits a day again. I guess I'll never know what happened, although the extra $600 bucks this pay period eases my disappointment.

If their stats gave me more info, I could have capitalized on whatever was going on and we all could have made more $.

some sponsors simply dont want to know where your sales are coming from.

:thumbsup

why ? explain to me how that helps anyone ?

once the traffic leaves your site, there isn't really anyway to track which hit generated the sign-up. Unless you only send traffic from one link.

That one of the things I like about NATS is the ability to add campaigns.. I just wish CCBill would hurry up and add that ability into their system.

If stats provided IPs then there would be less need to fool around with campaigns. Instead of creating custom links for "sponsor side" campaigns we'd do our own tracking and match the signup IPs to that.

If there are privacy issues with revealing IP addresses, then allow us to pass a freeform variable which shows against the signups. We'll probably put the IP in there anyway. :)

I know exactly, precisely where my sales come from. But not everyone uses the same traffic methods etc. though.

People will love our new stats at PimpRoll when they come out for tracking reasons.

This type of tracking is key to maximizing your traffic. There are sponsors out there that will set up a custom tracking field for you so that you can track and optimize all of the traffic within your network. It's nice to be able to track a signup not only to a referring page, but also the exact ad or link that they clicked on. If you are DB friendly, you'll soon be able to tell which ads are good producers and which ones are not. You can even determine revenue per impression this way; this is the only way to do it.

There's a lot more to this but I think most people get the idea.

I promote sammy4u.com and I can see where my sales are coming from, they use nats, pretty sure any nats program tells you the referring urls.

I have a number of programs I promote, and know which sites I mainly promote them on. I would say that for 90% of my sales I can track it. Some programs that do not offer stats, I have signed up with serveral accounts to track each one individually. Yes it is a pain in the ass to have to log in 6 times, but well worth the return that I get when i know what is working and whats not

Login to any nats program you make sales with
click on stats
then choose for the year
then where you see signups, click the number of hits

there is where it shows you referring urls

sounds like a search engine listed your aff url for a few days this happens sometimes its nice little bonus for doing nothing

you and me are on the same page, all they have to do is show you the ip of the signup, case closed. They don't have to change any programming on their end, nothing needs to be done except making that damn ip visable next to the signup in stats, that would be the easiest way.

allowing to add a dynamic identifier on the end of the url would work as well but I would think this would be a little more work on their part.

I have yet to have one person tell me what would be the big deal of letting the person who got the signup to see the ip of the person who signed up.

" sounds like" sucks. If he could have only known where that traffic came from I am sure that information would have been invaluable to him and would have helped him make more money.

the only where i dont know is from ccbill, other others i have campaigns for each domain.

I know which domains lead to which sales.

But I have some domains getting decent traffic and i have no idea how/why, but i'll take it :)

Referers are good, but they often don't let you go back far enough. For example, if you have a pool of FHGs used by 5 TGPs, the referer will be the FHG... so which TGP did the sale come from?

if they want to go this route they need to make it dynamic so we can change it on our end. For example (building on the one above) I use your FHG and i submit it to the hun, on the end of the url i put in h1, i submit it to sleazy dream oh wait i wouldn't do that he is an asshole, so i also submit it to worldsex, so i put ws1 on the end of that url, etc...

then in my stats it will show me the whole url for the fhg that got the signup, if i had 5 that had h1 on the end and 3 that had ws on the end i know i got 5 signups that day from the hun for that particular gallery.

That is the kind of stats we need, or ability to see ips. Anything else is either damn near impossible to do on a large scale ( making new campaigns from inside each affiliate admin area) or you are just plain shooting in the dark and have no idea of where the traffic is coming from. At best you make 5 new accounts to the same program so you can try to narrow it down :Oh crap this is fucking sad, so when will we get some better options ? I bet some programs could show the ip in affiliate stats by tomorrow if they wanted to.

With many FHGs it should be possible to add arbitrary variables to the URL, which will show up in referer stats...

eg http://galleries.sponsor.com/somechick/gallery1.php?ccbill=123456&template=2&myownvar=71

Some galleries use "SE friendly" URLs that may not like extra things added to the end, eg http://galleries.sponsor.com/somechick/1/2/123456/

The problem with doing it on either is that it is not guaranteed to work, or continue working. There needs to be movement from the biller end to encourage sponsors to use the extra features available.

jesus fuck you;re a whinny idiot

BTW... if I duplicated all my ccbill accounts over my ~30 TGPs (about 3,000 accounts total) I probably wouldn't even be able to view a day's worth of stats. :1orglaugh

go zango! go aff!

you right, little thing like tracking stats don't matter, from what i hear all of yours comes from china so no need for you to worry about little things like tracking.

You can always set campaigns and use diff groups of galleries per tgp site, a lil bit of extra work, but you could track it.

That requires the stats system support campaigns... there are still plenty of ccbill only programs...

Just email me and I will tell you where all the sign ups came from, I get sign ups from 20 different places so it does help to see what is doing the best. I have someone listing my galleries on his tgp and I let him know which ones are getting the sales and what ones are not. Yeah it takes a little time on my end but it works well.

i hear you, ip is the best way to go, no changing urls, sponsors do nothing on their end except show the damn thing. a dynamic identifier on end of the url, if it can be applied to all situations would be a big step in the right dirrection.

still yet to hear anyone say what is wrong with showing the ip of the person who signups ?

I dont know how it helps them out but they
must be convinced that it does.

I offered to buy my main sponsor a script
that I know all their affiliates would love!

But conversations last year & this year
seem to have fell on deaf ears.

I lost a lot of money by not knowing this
very important information :321GFY

i admire the jesture of trying to help, but emailing ips to affiliates for all signups they got..... there are things that can be done with programming that would be a lot more efficient for everyone.

this is a good thread. learned so much. I do get check from my sponsors, which is all I am happy about, but never really figured which one was really selling ...

maybe they really don't understand the importance of it for whatever reason, some of them may have never sent traffic in their lives, who knows why. But until a lot of affiliates start asking for it then I doubt they will just do it.

I really don't know why they wouldn't do it, i would love to hear some of them chime in and tell us why not.

Sleazy, how is this whining? He's right and anyone with a clue would know that.

We don't use "sponser4.html" to track our hits, some of us want to know WHICH gallery is generating the signups etc. It's pretty simple and logical.

Some of my best sales come from none. Yep, the dreaded "none" in NATS. While I know I only promote many sponsors from one site, I'd like to know which link sold them on the site.

On many of my sites in one niche, I have multi links for one site and wish I could track down which link sold the site

If they showed you the ip address of your sales i am sure there are 100 programers here who could set up programming for you that could break it down to the exact link the person clicked that you got the signup from, for a relatively cheap price I bet too.

How nice would it be to look at stats and see:
Program 1: 3 signups (view)

--------
3:15 URL: www.yoursite.com link2 source:google.
5:34 URL: www.yoursite.com link5 source:msn
9:02 URL: www.yoursite.com/hun23 link1 source: hun gallery 23


get the ip address from your signups and your stats can look like that.

I did have once 3 sales and didnt have idea from where they come so i installed counter script between source and destination.