Part 3: the affiliate marketing hamster wheel

Choosing A Tracker

Choosing a tracker, suitable for affiliate marketing, was a bit of a stumble for him.

Too many options.


But he read a bit on the topic and he went with the “recommended” one.

He now has an offer.

And he also has a tracker.

He now needs to set up that offer in his tracker…

He stumbled some more as he’s not sure what all these “{click.id}, {subid}, {cid}” etc tokens and sub ids mean. And the reason they are used.

He remembers watching Funnel Flux’s video explaining the tracking basics.

The thing that stood out was that tokens and sub ids are part of what’s called a link query string and they are just ways to pass information to the destination of the link.

It’s up to the destination (tracker) to do something with that info.

What’s important is that these tokens need to match the format and names that the destination tracker expects so it knows what to do with that information.

Learning About Tracking

He remembers writing down these key points and examples in his notes…

“So if an offer from an affiliate network has a query string at the end of the destination link (Everything from the ? onwards)

“../?clickid=[sub1]&pay=[sub2]…”

“…I’d need to replace those offer tokens sub1 and sub2 with my tracker’s values corresponding to these tokens and also use my tracker’s naming convention for those parameters…”

“So if my tracker is using curly brackets and {cid} corresponding to clickid and {payout} corresponding to the pay amount…”

“…I’d need to change that affiliate offer tracking link to ..?clickid={cid}&pay={payout}, when I add this offer in my tracker”

For the postback url he had these notes written down…

“postback url is what I put in a specific area inside an affiliate network under a section usually labelled postback, either under a specific offer I am promoting with that affiliate network or in a place that applies to all my offers (usually called global postback)…

“…And postback url is the way the affiliate network’s tracker notifies my tracker on conversions in a server-to-server tracking.”

“NOTE: I need to ensure my tracking link tokens for the postback url have the matching parameters of the affiliate network’s tracking link”

“ So following my example above, my postback url would need to be http://…?cid={clickid}&payout={pay}”.


But he was in luck.

As the tracker he chose has tracking templates and presets (prefilled with common parameters and tokens to make life easier) for many traffic source platforms and affiliate networks.

 “All good. No need to mess with those weird curly brackets thingies. But it’s good to know what they are used for” he thought.

The link was working.

He now thinks “I’ve got 2 out of 3 things I need to make money with affiliate marketing.”

“All I need now is traffic.”