How to Track Custom Campaigns

ShareASale offers a powerful tool, Affiliate Defined Tracking,  for tracking transactions back to a specific visitor on an Affiliate site or to a specific marketing campaign.  While there can be many uses and utilities for this tool, we will be reviewing one could-be-real-life story of how these tools are used.

Timmy and Tammy are building an Affiliate link shopping portal.  They want to donate Affiliate commissions to charity.  Timmy wants to donate to the American Cancer Society and Tammy wants to donate to the Alzheimer’s Association.  Timmy and Tammy decide to give shoppers on their site the ability to choose whether the commission from a purchase will be donated to either the American Cancer Society or the Alzheimer’s Association.  They also want to send an email to the shopper, letting them know how much commission has been donated.

Timmy and Tammy build a shopper registration feature on their site.  Shoppers register their email address and select whether donations will go to the American Cancer Society or the Alzheimer’s Association.  Timmy and Tammy save registration information to a database, creating a unique customer ID for each registrant, a column for the registrant’s American Cancer Society or Alzheimer’s Association selection, and the registrant’s email address.  Now that Timmy and Tammy are saving all of this information, they need to figure out how to determine which of the transactions in their Activity Details report in ShareASale are placed by what shopper.

ShareASale’s Affiliate Defined Tracking lets Affiliates pass up to 255 alphanumeric characters as the value in the afftrack= parameter of their Affiliate links.  ShareASale will then display the afftrack= value on any transactions that track in Activity Details.  To see the full details of the Affiliate Defined Tracking tool, log into your ShareASale Affiliate account and click on the below link to access our help center article on Using Affiliate Defined Tracking:

https://www.shareasale.com/a-helpcenter.cfm?ID=23

Timmy and Tammy discover the Using Affiliate Defined Tracking ShareASale help center article.  They program their site to require the shoppers to login before making a purchase and they pass the Customer ID from their database on Affiliate links.  Soon, Timmy and Tammy’s site is the toast of the town and they begin to get a lot of sales, all of which are tied to a customer in their database with an email address and a charity selection.  Timmy and Tammy can now make donations to the American Cancer Society and the Alzheimer’s Association based on the shopper’s customer ID, emailing that customer when a commission is paid from ShareASale and ready for donation.

While the Timmy and Tammy story focuses on using Affiliate Defined Tracking to track customers, the utility of the Affiliate Defined Tracking feature goes beyond just customers.  This tool is commonly used to tag incoming traffic from different marketing campaigns, such as a display, social, or search advertisement, and tie that traffic source to commissions, which is essential for measuring return on investment.