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Tracking

This section is related to tracking your site's visitors as they enter your website and storing an ID related to their activity which you can cross reference with information you can get from the affiliate network if the visitor makes a purchase.

For example:

  1. A visitor clicks a link on a third-party site (ie. Google or another blog) and comes to your website.
  2. The Datafeedr plugin stores a record with information about the visitor such as the referring URL, date and time, IP address and the URL on your website that they first landed on. At this point, a cookie is created on the visitor's browser that uniquely identifies this record.
  3. The visitor browses your website.
  4. When the visitor clicks the "Buy" button for a product, the ID which identifies this visitor is appended to the affiliate link before redirecting the user to the merchant's website.
  5. If the visitor makes a purchase on the merchant's website, the ID that was appended in the previous step will be recorded by the affiliate network along with other information about the sale.
  6. After you get the ID from the affiliate network, you can cross reference that with the ID stored on your website to see how this visitor (who made a purchase) got to your site and what page they landed on.  This will help you see what pages on your website are performing better than others.

Tracking on your website involves two separate processes:

  1. Saving visitor information to the database and creating an identifying referrer ID. (Database Tracking)
  2. Appending outgoing URLs (affiliate links) with the generated referrer ID. (URL rewriting)

Database tracking is done for all products, no matter if a REFERRER_ID is in the affiliate link or not. Database tracking is handled completely on the plugin side and the only way to disable is to turn it off in the plugin admin. URL rewriting will take place as long as the REFERRER_ID constant is set on the "Affiliate IDs & tracking parameters" options in the Factory.

Not all visitors will have a referrer ID.  This can happen if a visitor access your website either through a bookmark or by directly typing in your website's address into their browser.

Each setting related to Tracking is outlined in the following sections.