Ask Wade – affiliate tracking for merchants with no program

Hi Wade,
I have been a subscriber for a while and I first want to thank you for your blog. I appreciate it and I have started to get my feet wet in Aff marketing… But, the one main problem that I am running into is conversion tracking. I tried hitslink and conversionruler, but all of the affiliate links on my pages link to the manufacturers page – so I don’t have the BUY page on my site. Both hitslink and conversionruler seem to only be good if you can put the code on your purchase confirm page (which I don’t have)

So, what I really want to know is if there is any way to follow the user from the Google search to the purchase, IF the buy page isn’t on my site?

I appreciate any thoughts you may have on this
thanks,
bob

Hi Bob, and thanks for the question.  I am going to assume some things here -

1.  The merchants you are working with have no affiliate program in place
2. They have no interest in adding one at this tim

I have heard some super affiliates talk about requiring merchants to place their  own conversion reporting for them to allow them to effectively audit their PPC affiliate efforts.    In either case, there will need to be either an affiliate system integrated or some of your code placed on the site.   There’s simply no way that I know around this.  If the transaction is taking place on the merchants page – you need to have code there that will report when a conversion is successful.

Let me see if I can ping some super affiliate buddies to see if we can get you a hard fast answer on this.

In the meantime, if the merchants you are working with actually do their job of selling online effectively, you may want to steer them towards launching a low cost affiliate solution.   You can pick up software apps like GroundBreak or PostAffiliatePro that are pretty effective and feature good reporting.

You could also steer them towards a network like Shareasale or – if they are a nice online catalog retailer, AvantLink

Anyone have suggestions?

God Bless,

Wade