ClickBank Conversion Tracking for Affiliates

ClickBank conversion tracking is one of the most important tricks you need to master as a ClickBank affiliate. However, most affiliates pay little or no attention to it. If you’re new to ClickBank, make sure you read our ClickBank review first so you can follow the rest of this post.

There are two different types of ClickBank conversion tracking:

  1. PPC tracking with Google Adwords, MSN etc
  2. Their built-in TID tracking for all other ad sources

ClickBank Conversion Tracking – PPC Advertising

If you’re using PPC advertising to promote ClickBank products, you can use their built-in PPC conversion reporting feature.

Go to Account Settings > Integrated Sales Reporting > Add Tracking Code and you’ll be able to select your PPC network like below:

clickbank ppc conversion tracking

Select the PPC network (Google Adwords in the example), then enter your Google Adwords ID as well as your Adwords conversion tracking code ID.

When your campaigns generate a sale, you’ll be able to see the sales data within your Adwords account interface.

ClickBank Conversion Tracking – Other Traffic Sources

However, very few affiliates now use PPC to send direct traffic to ClickBank products. Instead, most affiliates use blogs, email broadcasts or affiliate landing pages. When you promote affiliate products indirectly, using the built-in PPC traffic tools aren’t really useful or accurate.

So how do you track your ClickBank conversions to a specific traffic source?

At the moment, the only way to do this seems to be with ClickBank’s TID affiliate tracking feature. TID tracking is one of the oldest forms of affiliate tracking, yet it’s the only tracking tool provided by most affiliate networks..

With TID tracking, you insert an identifier code after your Clickbank hoplinks to indentify the source of the sale. When you receive a commission, you’ll be able to see where the sale originated from.

In my LinkTrackr account, I entered the ClickBank hoplink but replaced the TID with LinkTrackr’s TID tracking code as below:

clickbank conversion TID code

For this promotion, I did two different email broadcasts to two different lists – the LinkTrackr users list, and my other list. The LinkTrackr user list is identified with the TID “aweberlt” since I sent out the broadcast using Aweber. The other list was tracked with the TID “aweber”.

In the example below, I can see which sales came from the two different list.

clickbank conversion tracking

 

From this data, and from the click data from my Aweber account, I can calculate the conversion rates for each list. From this experiment, the LinkTrackr customers list generated a much higher conversion rate.

However, there are two main setbacks to using TID codes for ClickBank conversion tracking. They are:

  1. Only one identifier. You’re only allowed to use one identifier code. Some networks allow you to have up to 5 identifier codes, but these are generally the exception to the rule.
  2. Only sales data. The TID tracking method only gives you sales data. With LinkTrackr you can get more information like traffic sources and browsers, but it’s hard to match an individual sale to it’s referring data other than the campaign name.

The bottom line is that you need to use any and all available tools to track your affiliate marketing campaigns.

Although ClickBank conversion tracking appears to be primitive, it’s still a useful tool that every affiliate marketer should make use of.

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5 Responses

  1. Thanks for this very clear and enlightening information. Indeed, the problem of conversion tracking is much overlooked, although it is one of THE most important elements of the entire statistic arsenal of a business. One cannot but wonder why so little attention is being paid to this element and why so few solutions are available.
    Your example is fine, but you did indeed faced the main problem : one can only track two sources. Maybe it would be a good idea if we would ALL (as many people as possible, e.g. ALL readers of this post to start with) ask ClickBank (for starters, later we could “attack” other similar sources like Amazon etc.) to enhance the number of TIDs allowed. I’ll byte the head off and start writing right away 😉

  2. Thanks buddy. I am having problem with Clickbank’s built in Tracking system. Thinking now to switch back to something else. Thanks for your article.

  3. Great article. One of the problems with AdWords conversion tracking if you are an affiliate marketer, is the conversion happens on somebody else’s site so you can’t put the AdWords conversion code on that site.

    I figured out a way to do it so I can track off-site affiliate conversions in AdWords, and therefore optimise my AdWords campaigns for conversions, even though they don’t take place on my site.

    I wrote up the method in an article on my blog http://timfelmingham.com/adwords-conversion-tracking-affilates/

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