One of the best ways to level up your affiliate marketing game is to learn how to track everything.
If you don’t have any tracking in place, then you won’t know which blog post, Facebook post or Youtube video is the one making you affiliate commissions for that affiliate product you are promoting.
Once you have this info at your fingertips, then you can make smarter decisions that will improve the ROI of your business dramatically.
If your Youtube video isn’t generating any affiliate commissions, that says you might want to improve your call to action. Or maybe it tells you that you shouldn’t focus on Youtube at all. Maybe you concentrate more on your blog.
Without this info, you are basically flying blind.
This has happened to me countless times. For example, I have a few older blog posts on this site (and other sites) where I promote the Thrive Themes membership. And I’ve steadily built up a decent $800-$1,000 recurring monthly income from it.
However, since I wasn’t diligent about tracking my affiliate links properly, I have no idea where my affiliate commissions came from.
Which makes it much more difficult for me to really grow it further.
But now that I know better, I’m careful not to let this happen anymore.
And in this tutorial series I’m going to show you how I do it, using one of my favorite marketing tools, ClickMagick.
Lets get Started
Now there are tons of tracking link software out there. Some are even free.
For example I used to use Pretty Links for a bit, and then switched over to a Wordpress plugin I had developed for myself called Smart Affiliate Links.
But once I discovered ClickMagick and saw everything it could do, I never looked back. And I consider it one of the essential tools in my affiliate marketing toolbox.
I’m currently using their Standard Plan ($47/mo) but everything I talk about you can do with the entry level Starter Plan as well.
There’s also a 14 day free trial, so you can just use that to follow along with the rest of the tutorial.
Tracking with SubIDs
So how are we going to track our results? We’re going to use these little text labels called subIDs.
SubIDs can be any string of text that have some sort of personal meaning to you.
If an affiliate program you are promoting supports subID tracking, then you will be able to add these subIDs to your affiliate links.
And when you view your affiliate reports you will see these subIDs listed next to each commission you get. Which you can use to identify the source of where the commission came from.
Let’s use Legendary Marketer as an example. Here’s what my affiliate link to the Legendary Marketer’s Club looks like:
https://checkout.legendarymarketer.com/order/marketers-club-offer?aid=38292&funnel=11&tid=
Notice that Legendary Marketer calls the subID tid, which I’ve highlighted at the end fo the link. Any text you put after the equals sign will be your subID value.
Now take a look at a snippet of my Legendary Affiliate Report. I’ve circled the subIDs that are associated with each commission I earned.
Because I used a subID with my tracking links, I can get some additional info from this report I might not have otherwise.
For example, I can see that one person purchased the Legendary Marketer’s Club through my Legendary Case Study page (subID: legendaryfunnel).
Another purchased from a FB post I wrote (subID: fb).
And a couple people signed up for the Business Builder Challenge through a solo ad I ran with Demian Voorhagen on June 7, 2019 (subID: demian06072019).
Do you see the potential here?
Using these particular subIDs, I can figure out how profitable my paid solo ad campaigns are, and how well my organic traffic sources (Case study funnel, Facebook) are performing.
Getting Started with ClickMagick
Ok, now that you understand how the subIDs work, let me show you some of the cool things ClickMagick can do.
First, you’ll need to create a tracking link in ClickMagick. The one below is for my Legendary Marketer’s Club affiliate link:
The one thing I want to show you is how ClickMagick lets me pass in my subID through to my Legendary affiliate link.
I do this by adding the special string [s1] at the very end, where the subID value should go.
I’m going to do some hand waving over the technical details of how it works, but what this means is that only need to create one single tracking link per affiliate link.
And whenever you include your tracking link on a blog post, a Youtube video, or any other place, you just append different subIDs to it by adding a slash and your subID value.
Here’s an example:
On my Legendary Marketer review article I would use this link:
1) http://go.smartbusinesstrends.com/legendary/sbt_legendaryreview
On my Legendary Marketer pricing article I would use this link instead:
2) http://go.smartbusinesstrends.com/legendary/sbt_legendarypricing
And if I really wanted to get even more detailed (I usually do), I would have a different tracking link for every affiliate link on my review post.
So the link below would be for the one call to action button at the bottom of my review.
3) http://go.smartbusinesstrends.com/legendary/sbt_legendaryreview_ctabutton
Compare this to free services like Pretty Link or bit.ly.
If you wanted to do the same thing, you would have to create a new tracking link for every one of these variations. That sucks!
When you have a lot of affiliate links, this is not scalable at all.
But with ClickMagick I just need to have this one single tracking link:
http://go.smartbusinesstrends.com/legendary
And I can add additional context to it (the subID) based on where it’s being used.
This is one of the big reasons why I love ClickMagick.
By knowing exactly what links are getting clicked and leading to sales, I now have all the data I need to properly tweak my affiliate marketing campaigns and improve my ROI.
Final Thoughts
This is probably the most common way you will be using ClickMagick to track your affiliate links. It’s pretty simple, but it will definitely level up your affiliate marketing game if you use it.
ClickMagick has a ton of other great features that I will go into more in future tutorials.
Remember, having more info at your disposal is the best way to grow your business. So don’t cheap out and use a less capable link tracking solution.
