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As an affiliate marketer, you probably use multiple networks and promotional offers from numerous suppliers. But what if you want to track affiliate marketing promotions over a seasonal period like the holidays?
In this post, we'll go over a recent experiment we did with ThirstyAffiliates, which explains how easy it is to monitor your affiliate marketing promotions. Let's get to it!
Step 1 – Create Unique Links
First, ThirstyAffiliates allows you to quickly and easily create as many affiliate links in WordPress as you'd like.
In our experiment, each of the affiliate networks we were promoting was running specials. We decided to set up some Black Friday/Thanksgiving affiliate links to use specifically for this promotion.
Rather than using our regular affiliate program links, we created separate affiliate links for these promotions. This would enable us to use these links again next year and we'd be able to track how the same campaign performs for different years – all using the same links.
Step 2 – Create A Separate Category
Next, we created a special “Black Friday” promotional link category.
Each of the affiliate links in our promotion was added to this category. So we were able to quickly pull out the links related to Black Friday/Thanksgiving using the category filter.
Step 3 – Create Child Categories
We were promoting WordPress themes, hostings, and other things related to our niche. There were multiple suppliers under each of these categories.
For example, there were three WordPress theme companies doing specials, so they went under a “Themes” category. There were also two hosting companies running great specials, so we grouped them together under a “Hosting” child category.
We created a number of child categories to sit under the main Black Friday category:
The categories feature in ThirstyAffiliates is great for keeping your affiliate marketing organized. See how our new child categories are automatically placed under the “Black Friday/Thanksgiving” parent category:
Step 4 – Reporting and Statistics
Yes, we wanted to put our affiliate links into separate categories to help keep things organized and track our affiliate marketing promotions year after year for this seasonal promotion. But, we also had another reason for doing it: reporting.
Affiliate link Click Reporting, which is included in the Premium and Professional versions of ThirstyAffiliates, allows you to track clicks by category.
Remember, we organized our links under the parent category “Black Friday / Thanksgiving”, and then grouped the links under child categories like “Themes” and “Hosting”. Now we could report on the campaign statistics as a whole by looking at the statistics for the parent category, or we could report on specific parts of the campaign.
We could also report on individual links under the campaign by viewing stats for that link alone.
Stay Organized While Getting Amazing Insight With Stats
The first great thing about tracking your special affiliate marketing promotions using ThirstyAffiliates is the ability to re-use links. As we've explained, it's perfect for seasonal campaigns like Black Friday.
Second, the link categories function of ThirstyAffiliates goes beyond the simple flat categories of other link tools. With our categories, we can organize tiers of links. This feature is helpful with those really hairy campaigns when you're promoting lots of links and lots of companies.
Last but not least, you can take the link categories and see exactly what offers are performing well. If you set things up as we did in the above experiment, you can even report on how your campaign is doing as a whole.
This incredible ability to track affiliate marketing promotions is available to you right now with ThirstyAffiliates.
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