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As an affiliate, how can we get more information on sales?

It looks like the goals feature in GA is for those who have control over the receipt page. But we are sending users away using an affiliate link.

With event tracking, we've been able to count the clicks and see which links are being clicked the most, but not which ones actually convert.

We want to find out the following on each sale:

  1. Did the converted user come from search or internal traffic?

  2. If it was search, which keyword brought the user to our site (and clicked away and converted)?

Is it possible?

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  • If the user leaves your website and goes to the advertisers website how do you expect to track that data without being able to set a pixel or post back URL on the advertisers website? It's not impossible just not likely anyone is setup to post back to your site with GA tracking code for each converted visitor you sent them.
    – Anagio
    Jun 24, 2012 at 12:49
  • You might want to try asking the site owner for a read access to their GA. However, there is a good chance that he might refuse. As long as they are using a good affiliate tracking tool you should be good.
    – Prasad Ajinkya
    Dec 21, 2012 at 19:07

4 Answers 4

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  1. Google Analytics is not Affiliate Tracking tool, you have to be the website owner in order to track its pages.
  2. You can track your affiliate landing pages using GA
  3. If you'll open a GA account and register your landing pages you'll be able to see in: Standard Reporting -> Sources -> All traffic the breakdown of the traffic sources
  4. Standard Reporting -> Sources -> search will show you the keywords that were used.

    You can find more information in regards here
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Take a look at the following which demonstrates what you're trying to do.

http://sem-group.net/search-engine-optimization-blog/tracking-affiliate-clicks-in-google-analytics-5/

Also, depending on what affiliate network you're working with they usually allow you to pass sub parameters through the URL. You can pass a unique ID into the clicked link and compare the data from the affiliate networks to the stats Google provides.

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In short no, it's not possible. You are correct in that GA conversion tracking requires the ability to track the receipt page.

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Google Analytics serve a different purpose. Essentially, as you describe in your question, the tool allows you to track / analyze everything that happens on your site and pages that you fully control. If you send your visitor away to a third party site, unless you have your code embedded on that site, you won't be able to pick up the conversion information.

You can (and should) work with a tracking solution which allows affiliate networks to fire back to you conversion/revenues through server 2 server / postback URL's.

Obviously, the powerful features of google analytics shouldn't be neglected,but they should be used to analyze what is actually happening on your site, segment the audience for retargeting campaigns, on-site ab testing etc.. etc... When it comes to affiliate tracking, pick a solution which has been built for this purpose.

Good luck

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