How to track what initial traffic source caused an event

Question

Events on my site (e.g. conversions and registrations) most of the time don't happen right away. What I want to do is create a tracking script that allows the user to click a link and that link contains the traffic source. If that link click eventually results in a conversion I want it attributed to the original link click, (not the most recent because that is usually Direct / None.

Something like http://domain.com/?track=originalsource

I'm going to have affiliates and maybe I can give them google links to track which affiliates are generating conversions.

Or maybe there's some good software out there that can do something really good like that?

Answer 1

This article is from 2010 so it may need some modification to the implementation, but here's how it's done with Google Analytics:

http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/first-touch-tracking-in-google-analytics/

Answer 2

I ran into the same problem a few years ago. I set a cookie when a user came in on an affiliate link and when the user checked out, I would check to see if that cookie had been set. It worked pretty well.