Affiliate tracking is the process of tracking the performance of an affiliate program. In order to set up the tracking process, advertisers do the following:
- assign a unique ID to every affiliate who enter the affiliate program
- give them unique affiliate links
- track where users are coming from with the help of affiliate links
In such a way, advertisers are able to understand what affiliates should get the commission for visitor, lead, or sale. It helps them to measure the real traffic that is coming to their web page that allows avoiding affiliate fraud.
Affiliate tracking is also used to measure the performance of individual affiliates and optimize or cut the partnership with them. Advertisers can suggest an improvement for content or anchor text to an affiliate or optimize their landing pages if they see that there are many visitors who never convert. They may also decide to invest in partnership with some affiliates more if they see that they are performing the best.
Usually, tracking software (also known as affiliate software or affiliate tracking software) is used to do so. Such software often presents analytics on every individual affiliate and gives visualization on the best-performing affiliates and pages.
