I'm creating a kind of affiliate marketing website with products I've scraped from partner websites. The user clicks on the Buy link and is re-directed to the partner site to complete the purchase. If the user buys the product, I should get a percentage of the sales. So far this model is a pretty common approach.
However the element that I don't yet understand is, what technology or script do other affiliate sites use to track to see if the user, once they've let the main site, does purchase the product or not? How do I track my user's purchase or actions once they've left my site?
I know that cookies can store brief user information but I don't think that's enough. I need to then store this information in a database. Should I use php sessions for this?
Any tips or suggestions is really appreciated.
Cheers
What technology or script do other affiliate sites use to track to see if the user, once they've let the main site, does purchase the product or not?
Javascript. Affiliate Softwares usually have click tracking code which is placed on the landing pages. Once a vsitor comes to landing page through an affiliate website, a random visitor id along with affiliate id mapping is created which gets stored in the database. At this same time, a cookie gets created with the visitor id, affiliate id info etc. When the user finishes a purchase, there is a sales tracking code javascript code which is placed on the purchase page that gets trigerred. You can use create this code and insert the visitor's id along with affiliate id in the database.
How do I track my user's purchase or actions once they've left my site?
I have answered this partly in the above question. But once the user comes back again, it is going to recognise this user based on cookie and preferably you can store the session value in the cookie itself rather than the database, because the sale entry will get created in the database once the user has completed his purchase, if you have placed your sale tracking code at the end of purchase page.
Related
I want to track user visits & user conversions who come via my Affiliates, however a caveat is that my users will land, register and hence convert on a 3rd party site. I own a Wordpress website and my user registration page is hosted on a 3rd party. My Affiliates will send an email blast to their users with the email containing unique Affiliate link to register on that 3rd party. Successful registration page is also hosted on that 3rd party itself and hence my website never comes into picture during the entire process right from user landing to user conversion.
So essentially following are the basic features that I require:
Ability to manage (create, edit, delete) Affiliates.
Ability to generate required links, creatives and tracking pixels or any code which can help to track user visits and conversions.
Ability to track the number of user impressions and user conversions per Affiliate including how many users from a particular Affiliate landed on the 3rd party registration page and which users (with basic details such as name, country etc.) actually got converted.
Various reports mainly based on Date and Affiliates.
The 3rd part is ready to host some code (such as tracking pixel) from my side.
I have already tried using 'WP Affiliate Manager' plugin in Wordpress, however using its ‘Creatives’ and ‘Tracking Pixels’ can only report the impression/conversion, but not other user details such as Name, Country etc. which would be collected by the 3rd party on the registration page and hence my entire purpose is not fulfilled.
I need to get this done today. Please let me know what could be the quickest solution.
Best Regards!
If you are vCommission affiliate user then go through this link http://developers.hasoffers.com/#/affiliate/controller/Affiliate_AffiliateUser/method/findAll
You will got all user details after 14 days if he does shopping using your affiliate link.
Udemy is one of the worlds leading online training websites with over 6 millions users. You can make your own courses on any subject and give it away for free or sell it.
I have my own personal site which is a landing page for my Udemy course where I collect the users emails and give them free content on a second page before they click a button to head over to Udemy to buy my course.
When a user opts into my landing page I assign a unique ID to there email. As well as information from a referral id / referrer telling me where the link was clicked which is just took from the URL as a GET HTTP variable.
I can then give someone or start a traffic source with my link which has a referral id and can link that user once they sign up with this id to see the percentage of users to viewing my landing page to opting in from a given referrer id or link.
Through Google Analytics's I can also monitor all the pages on my Udemy account by giving them my Google Analytics's ID after setting up a site in the Analytics's dashboard for my Udemy course.
I've setup a site within Analytics's for my landing page / personal website as well as Udemy. I want to track the conversions of visitors going from my landing page to purchasing the course on Udemy.
Is this possible?
To summarize I can track them both independently its just linking my personal website with Udemy so I can see which user went onto my site has bought a course on Udemy. If I could store there unique ID at the point of sale somewhere? Google Analytics's ?
Without this then I don't know which referral ID / referrer from a particular traffic source converted the most into sales!
I would really appreciated some help. :)
I want to offer users a unique Affiliate ID code that can be used to promote their marketing efforts in the form of a number generated when they signup or register on any of my Drupal project sites. At them moment, Ubercart (UC) Affiliate as far as I can see only shows the Users Affiliate Id number as their UID (i.e /site/affiliate/user/47 or similar).
My reason being is that an Affiliate User can 'introduce' new businesses by telling them to 'type in my code' in a search box then the system will take them to a 'list of Ubercart' offers which is related to that Affiliate user. So in the 'real world' sense a member could put a card in a shop window (write their number on it in pen; ie 142357) and later a 'reader' of the said card could enter such a code number into their device browser for enhanced sales benefits and the UC system track the affiliate as per the user type of backend system. At the moment, the current UC UID structure isn't that workable for my requirements.
I would like to be able to do this with Rules at the User site Sign-up stage and have a code set in a Profile type.
Does anyone have any ideas on how this could be achieved? From a marketing promotional perspective, I think this has lots of value to a marketing/sales dept (speaking as an ex-business college lecturer). (-:
Just trying to make a conversion tracking system (pixel+cookie) with PHP for study purpose. Just need some ideas and guides regarding this from tracker point of view.
I have basic understanding on how it works. Basically there are 4 parties involved: merchant, tracker, promoter and user. Merchant places iframe based pixel (from tracker) on their thank you (last check out) page.
User surfs the web, finds an ad/offer and clicks
It directs to tracker. Then tracker puts cookie on user's computer and redirects to merchant's landing page
User likes the product during this first visit. He/she adds to cart, checkouts and make a payment. Thank you page shows up and fires the pixel.
Tracker get necessary parameters and checks for cookie in user's computer, records the sales and gives credit to the promoter.
Well, all this works if there is only one tracker, merchant, promoter.
My questions are:
(a) How to correctly identify sales when multiple parties are involved?
(b) Also user may not buy the product on the same day. Instead he/she might come back directly and buy the product after a week or two.
(a) Scenario
M- Merchant
T1,T2,T3 - trackers (supposing we are T1)
U - user
In this case merchant may join force with all three trackers and put pixel from each on their thank you page.
User may have landed on particular merchants page from all the tracker links including us. In this case user's computer contains all three cookies from three different trackers.
When user buys the product and reaches Thank you page pixel will fire up for all three tracker. Each tracker will check for cookie and finds their cookie present and might confirm sales.
In this case, there is a possibility of 3 recorded sales where in fact is just one sale.
So the question is how each tracker will know, whether this sales is theirs or not and avoid that as they cannot access cookies of other trackers?
(b) Scenario
Same goes for after click tracking.
Supposing cookie duration is 30 days. (i) User buys product after 15 days after clicking the ad. (ii) Multiple cookie must have already been present in user's computer.
So from particular tracker's point of view, how do we identify the sale correctly?
First, it depends on what you mean by "tracker." A tracker usually is a 3rd party affiliate network that uses a tracking solution. They pair up a merchant (who is selling the product) with a publisher (who advertises and displays the link).
So to answer to question A:
I think it would be unlikely for a merchant to have 3 different "trackers" sending them visitors. Typically, if you were the merchant, you sign up with one affiliate network, then recruit publishers within that network. It wouldn't be smart to sign up with more than one, probably for this very reason.
If more than one cookie was set (within the one affiliate network), the affiliate network would typically use the rule of "last cookie," which means the last ad that was clicked before the purchase is the one that the sale goes to.
Take a look at this similar Quora question: http://www.quora.com/Should-merchants-use-multiple-affiliate-networks-to-sell-their-product-Why-or-why-not
In answer to Question B:
If cookie duration is 30 days, and a user comes back in 15, there should be no problem. If the buyer goes directly to the merchant's site, buys the product, and see's the "thank you" page where the tracking pixel (or whatever tracking solution they use) is, that pixel will fire. The pixel calls a server-side script, like PHP, that will test whether the user has the particular cookie. So it doesn't matter whether the user comes back directly, or when they come back to buy the product. As long as they still have that cookie (within the 30 day limit), the sale will be registered.
I'm developing one social game which is similar to friends for sale game.
In the game user buys and sells friends.
Buyer of the user becomes owner of that user.
I developed logic and it works perfect as per calculation.
But when we have many number of users there is problem with this action of buy button.
E.g. 5 users are on same profile i.e. UserXYZ. Now 2 of them clicks on buy button at the same time, same second.
Amount of cash is being loose from both the accounts but only one becomes owner.
I want to stop this cash losing problem.
This problem occurs because script executes at the same time for both the users but only one of them becomes owner.
I have no idea how to stop this over sale clicks. Website is in PHP/MySQL.
Any help will really be appreciated.
without seeing any of your code, i can't really give a code answer, but, in theory i would fix this like so:
when your sending your ajax "buy friend" request, send the current owner id along with it.
In your php, check if the friend that is getting bought has the same owner, if it does, do the sale, if not, reply a friendly message saying "sorry, someone else bought them"
Instead of subtracting the money from the front-end, subtract the money from the backend after the user has been successfully added to that owner. That way you avoid the problem. Make sure you pass the ownerid to the backend, which you should be doing already.