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I want to start doing affiliate marketing on a blog. Now I have someone who wants to advertise who has contacted me.
How do I know if he has made a sale to a user who came through my website?
Is this only possible to track using a third party in order to know he isn't lying?
If so, what platforms are available for this kind of "indpendent" affiliate marketing?
i.e I don't need the matchmaking service, just the tracking service.
the blog is Wordpress if it matters
Offer a substantial kickback to customers who are referred through your site. Your advertiser sends you the money and customer names of the sales. Anyone who comes to you for their kickback that the advertiser didn't tell you about, tough luck.
You could find out if they have an affiliate program on a network such as Webgains. You can then sign up to that and Webgains will track the sales and the payment will come through them.
As far as I'm aware its fine if you're an independent site.
I use http://zferral.com/ which has a nice API to integrate with. If you have a basic ecommerce site you may want to use Magento, or CS-Cart which has a built in affiliate management system. You'll need to use one of these to track affiliate sales easily.
You can't be sure if conversion happens at your advertiser's site. If they have bug in tracking then conversion will not be recorded. It has happened with me with a big affiliate marketing company paying on the basis of CPA ads.
DGM India once told me due to bug Rediff ads could not be tracked. I lost revenue for 15 days. Moreover I do believe in CPA based ads, sometimes advertiser companies do under report or deliberately do something to lose such tracking data.
That's why I think why Google wouldn't want to get into CPA ads.
As ddyer has mentioned above you can show some discount voucher or freebie if somebody buys from your advertiser, then in most of cases people will contact you to claim the freebie. In the longer run you'll know which advertiser is honest or not.
