The affiliate marketing industry contributes a lot to the online world. Through affiliate marketing, you can get the opportunity to become a digital marketer, and with that, gain the capability to effectively create and manage digital marketing campaigns and content.

There are several different methods of monetizing websites through affiliate marketing, such as showing ads, selling affiliate products, sponsorships, and most notably tracking. While there are many similarities between these methods, they also have significant differences. One of the most significant differences is the level of tracking provided by each method. With online advertising, you have a general idea of which ads brought in the revenue and which ones didn’t. With affiliate marketing, you have far more detail on how effective each campaign was and which ones performed best.

The Level Of Tracking In Affiliate Marketing

When you set up your affiliate marketing business, one of the first things you need to do is choose a tracking platform. Obviously, you need a place to keep all of this information, and using a spreadsheets to track affiliate sales can be extremely inefficient. Other platforms offer different levels of tracking depending on the type of information you’re looking for. For example, if you’re only interested in sales, you can set up a simple affiliate tracker where you can track the sales of a particular product or service along with basic information such as the date and time the sale occurred.

For those who prefer more detail, you can set up a complex affiliate tracker that has far more features and is much more accurate at tracking sales. This type of platform can be expensive, but it also provides a lot of value.

Online Advertising: Comparing Tracking To E-Mail

If you’ve ever bought a product or service through online advertising, you know exactly how valuable it can be to have a proper tracking system in place. When you place an advert in a prominent folder or on a website, you usually end up seeing multiple advertisements from numerous companies. This might not sound like a good thing, but the convenience of being able to view multiple offers from different brands is actually quite useful. You can click on any of the ads and be taken to a landing page where you can learn more about the product or service or make a purchase. At this point, the advertiser wants to know which ad brought in the most revenue and which one performed the best.

In some instances, the advertiser will provide you with very limited information. For example, if you click on an ad on a gaming website, you will see a small image of a game with a small button at the top right corner that says “Learn More,” click on that, and you will be taken to a landing page for the product or service. If the advertiser doesn’t provide you with any details on the conversion, you have no way of knowing if the product or service is actually relevant to you.

On the other hand, if the advertiser has set up a proper tracking system, you’ll see a summary of the entire campaign. This includes all of the ads along with the URLs, date and time the ad was placed, and the amount spent on adverts and the landing page. In this way, you can have all the information you need at your fingertips. You can compare this to an e-mail marketing campaign where you have no idea what ads were delivered to whom, and if you don’t have all the information at your fingertips, you can’t make effective business decisions. Online advertising does have its perks, but they mostly come from the fact that you have so much information at your fingertips.

The Advantages Of Tracking In Affiliate Marketing

Aside from giving you the ability to make more informed decisions regarding your affiliate marketing business, tracking also has several advantages.

To start with, setting up a proper tracking system gives you the ability to see how your efforts are performing and where you’re spending your time.

If you decide to track affiliate sales, you will be able to see how many people are actually clicking on the affiliate links you provided and how much money you’re making. This is a lot more effective than simply relying on your gut feeling or the numbers reported by some digital marketing tool.

If you decide to track adverts placed on your site (which is a common practice), you will be able to see how much these adverts are costing you. This is a good way to quickly determine whether or not the effort is worth it. If you find that a certain type of ad costs more than others, you can opt for a different form of advertising without risking a loss.

The Disadvantages Of Tracking In Affiliate Marketing

Just like with most things in life, there are disadvantages to tracking in affiliate marketing as well.

One of the biggest disadvantages is that if you decide to go the extra mile and set up a complex tracking system, you’ll end up spending a lot of money without seeing any significant results. The fact is, even the most complex systems have bugs that can cause errors, and these errors will hide the truth of what’s actually going on. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t set up a complex system, but you should try to avoid using one that is overly complicated because you’ll just end up ruing the effort later on.

Another disadvantage to tracking is that if you’re not careful, this information can be very easily manipulated. For example, if you decide to track the e-mails sent to your list along with the affiliate sales, you can easily pull a number out of the air and make it look like your list is generating a lot more revenue than it actually is. If you find that some of your affiliate links are earning you a lot of money but your e-mail list isn’t, this could be an indication that your affiliate links have started performing better than you expected because you’re not actually getting the quality of leads you thought you were.

The Importance Of Testing

In addition to the fact that setting up a proper tracking system can help you make more informed decisions regarding your affiliate marketing business, testing can be extremely important. This is especially true if you’re deciding to use affiliate marketing to gain additional revenue streams (such as displaying ads on your site).

If you decide to test a particular affiliate link or product, you’ll need to set up a special landing page on your site that will be used to track the success (or failure) of the particular campaign. To start with, you can simply track the number of visits to the page, the date and time these visitorsthe amount of time they spent on the page and any other relevant information (such as how many times the page was clicked on). This is a temporary solution until you can set up a proper tracking system (which, if you’re doing this, you probably already have).

Once you have a proper tracking system in place, you’ll be able to see far more detailed information including which ads brought in the revenue, how long these visitors stayed on the site after they clicked on an ad, and much more.

Final Takeaway

Tracking can be extremely useful if done correctly, but it also has a lot of pitfalls that even the most experienced marketers can fall into. To prevent yourself from becoming a victim of this, you should only use tracking tools that you know and understand how to use properly. Additionally, even if you do set up a proper tracking system, you’ll still have to test each campaign individually to see if it’s truly providing you with the results you’re looking for. This is why the effort is usually much better spent on creating quality content that is relevant to your audience rather than simply using tools to track the effectiveness of your campaigns.