mmaurer
07-19-2006, 02:55 PM
I was hoping to get some ideas re: how to approach this...
Our company uses an affiliate marketing company to distribute our banners and links so we can drive traffic to our web store.
The company we use to recruit sites and track commissions based on referrals works great. The whole problem we have is that we don't have any way of distinguishing these referrals from people who enter our web store from our own site or other sources. We like to track where these people come from (naturally) and our executives, being incredibly new to web marketing, want very hard numbers on these visitors (like if they're long-time customers or new prospects, etc.).
I broached this issue with the company we used to create our web store and he said we could have a string of code that recognizes the URL the customer came from. This would, in turn, attach a promo code (for lack of a better term) to the order and we would be able to run reports in our order entry system to root out these orders and get more information. However, with these affiliate programs, the URL isn't consistent so we can't just drop a line or two of code in telling it to look for certain terms. (Can we?)
I understand how the sites refer to us and how that info goes back to the marketing company for commission payouts and click measurement. What I don't know is how we can "implant" something in our site to distinguish these visitors from regular ones. Like I said, we're fairly new to this whole process so any advice we can get would be great.
Our company uses an affiliate marketing company to distribute our banners and links so we can drive traffic to our web store.
The company we use to recruit sites and track commissions based on referrals works great. The whole problem we have is that we don't have any way of distinguishing these referrals from people who enter our web store from our own site or other sources. We like to track where these people come from (naturally) and our executives, being incredibly new to web marketing, want very hard numbers on these visitors (like if they're long-time customers or new prospects, etc.).
I broached this issue with the company we used to create our web store and he said we could have a string of code that recognizes the URL the customer came from. This would, in turn, attach a promo code (for lack of a better term) to the order and we would be able to run reports in our order entry system to root out these orders and get more information. However, with these affiliate programs, the URL isn't consistent so we can't just drop a line or two of code in telling it to look for certain terms. (Can we?)
I understand how the sites refer to us and how that info goes back to the marketing company for commission payouts and click measurement. What I don't know is how we can "implant" something in our site to distinguish these visitors from regular ones. Like I said, we're fairly new to this whole process so any advice we can get would be great.