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Affiliate Tracking Software is used to track the referral, endorsement or recommendation made by one person or company to buy products or services from another person or company. Tracking is necessary to manage and reward or compensate the participants of an affiliate marketing group of participants or affiliate networks.
The original concept comes from Affinity marketing. The participants that agree to promote or be promoted are called "affiliates". Those that promote and recommend are called "marketers" and those that have the products or services that are promoted are called "advertisers".
The affiliate tracking software can be self-hosted or operate in the cloud. Regardless of that, trackers record page views and clicks on advertising material (banners, clicks, etc.), while also recording conversions, i.e. events that are deemed valuable by the marketers.
Several online businesses create affiliate networks to manage affiliates that promote their products and services. Affiliate platforms are companies that intermediate and manage both marketers and advertisers, operating as brokers.
The core of affiliate marketing software is tracking the various aspects of a given action, that are commonly categorized in eight types:
Tracking refers to user-client IP detection, browser detection, marketer's affiliate referral and advertiser's completed transaction.
The main feature of affiliate marketing software is consolidation of data that allows marketers and advertisers to perform various marketing optimization techniques.
Although affinity marketing refers to marketing to persons sharing the same interests, the derived affiliate networks is closely related to sales channels and sales campaigns paying sales commissions, the reason why a solid and reliable software is required to prevent fraud and provide security and privacy for the parties involved in the transactions.
While affiliate tracking is a key component of any affiliate tracking software, it is usually closely tied to conversion attribution models such as "first click" or "last click" attribution. "In fact, regardless of your marketing activity, tracking a conversion has no real value unless you can attribute it to the traffic source, keyword and campaign that brought the user in the first place.
The attribution model applies a business rule that credits a tracked conversion to the first or last affiliate that referred the visitor to the merchant's website.
Affiliate marketing is a marketing arrangement in which affiliates receive a commission for each visit, signup or sale they generate for a merchant. This arrangement allows businesses to outsource part of the sales process. It is a form of performance-based marketing where the commission acts as an incentive for the affiliate; this commission is usually a percentage of the price of the product being sold, but can also be a flat rate per referral.
Click fraud is a type of fraud that occurs on the Internet in pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising. In this type of advertising, the owners of websites that post the ads are paid based on how many site visitors click on the ads. Fraud occurs when a person, automated script, computer program or an auto clicker imitates a legitimate user of a web browser, clicking on such an ad without having an actual interest in the target of the ad's link in order to increase revenue. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud.
Cost per action (CPA), also sometimes misconstrued in marketing environments as cost per acquisition, is an online advertising measurement and pricing model referring to a specified action, for example, a sale, click, or form submit.
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising, and mobile advertising. Advertisements are increasingly being delivered via automated software systems operating across multiple websites, media services and platforms, known as programmatic advertising.
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage. Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research and assess and improve website effectiveness. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns. It can be used to estimate how traffic to a website changes after launching a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views, or create user behavior profiles. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends, which is useful for market research.
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic and also the mobile app traffic & events, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.
HTTP cookies are small blocks of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's web browser. Cookies are placed on the device used to access a website, and more than one cookie may be placed on a user's device during a session.
In Internet marketing, search advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on web pages that show results from search engine queries. Through the same search-engine advertising services, ads can also be placed on Web pages with other published content.
Targeted advertising is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting. These traits can either be demographic with a focus on race, economic status, sex, age, generation, level of education, income level, and employment, or psychographic focused on the consumer values, personality, attitude, opinion, lifestyle and interest. This focus can also entail behavioral variables, such as browser history, purchase history, and other recent online activities. The process of algorithm targeting eliminates waste.
Mobile web analytics studies the behaviour of mobile website users in a similar way to traditional web analytics. In a commercial context, mobile web analytics refers to the data collected from the users who access a website from a mobile phone. It helps to determine which aspects of the website work best for mobile traffic and which mobile marketing campaigns work best for the business, including mobile advertising, mobile search marketing, text campaigns, and desktop promotion of mobile sites and services.
Behavioral retargeting is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is targeted to consumers based on their previous internet behaviour. Retargeting tags online users by including a pixel within the target webpage or email, which sets a cookie in the user's browser. Once the cookie is set, the advertiser is able to show ads to that user elsewhere on the internet via an ad exchange.
Pay-per-sale or PPS is an online advertisement pricing system where the publisher or website owner is paid on the basis of the number of sales that are directly generated by an advertisement. It is a variant of the CPA model, where the advertiser pays the publisher and/or website owner in proportion to the number of actions committed by the readers or visitors to the website.
Performance-based advertising, also known as pay for performance advertising, is a form of advertising in which the purchaser pays only when there are measurable results. Performance-based advertising is becoming more common with the spread of electronic media, notably the Internet, where it is possible to measure user actions resulting from advertisement. Performance marketing is different from Brand Marketing which focuses on awareness, consideration and opinions among target consumers.
On the World Wide Web, cookie stuffing is an affiliate marketing technique in which, as a result of visiting a website, a user receives a third-party cookie from a website unrelated to that visited by the user, usually without the user being aware of it. If the user later visits the target website and completes a qualifying transaction, the cookie stuffer is paid a commission by the target. Because the stuffer has not actually encouraged the user to visit the target, this technique is considered illegitimate by many affiliate schemes.
A view-through rate (VTR), measures the number of post-impression response or viewthrough from display media impressions viewed during and following an online advertising campaign. Such post-exposure behavior can be expressed in site visits, on-site events, conversions occurring at one or more Web sites or potentially offline:
Call tracking software records information about incoming telephone calls, and in some regions even the conversation. Call tracking is a technology which can enable the pay per call, pay per minute or pay per lead business model, allowing the tracking of phone calls to be associated with performance-based advertising such as Google AdWords, SEO Services, Display and Electronic Direct Marketing, and supplying additional analytic information about the phone calls themselves. Call tracking is a method of performance review for advertising and/or staff. It is based on the technological possibility of measuring the behavior of callers and is thus the equivalent in telephony to the conversion tracking used on the internet. Via different channels, both procedures offer the opportunity of clearly assigning a customer response to a specific advertising medium.
In electronic commerce, conversion marketing is marketing with the intention of increasing conversions—that is, site visitors who are paying customers.
In marketing, attribution, also known as multi-touch attribution, is the identification of a set of user actions that contribute to a desired outcome, and then the assignment of a value to each of these events. Marketing attribution provides a level of understanding of what combination of events in what particular order influence individuals to engage in a desired behavior, typically referred to as a conversion.
Email retargeting can refer to either:
Ad fraud is concerned with the practice of fraudulently representing online advertisement impressions, clicks, conversion or data events in order to generate revenue. Ad-frauds are particularly popular among cybercriminals.