Hi AffLIFTers
I’m still pretty new to affiliate marketing but I'm feeling a lot more confident that I did when I first got started. In the beginning, one of the things I struggled with IMMENSELY was tracking tokens… but after persisting for about a month I had a nice little lightbulb moment and since then it’s been smooth sailing. I shared this post on STM a few months ago and the post was really well received and is still getting some attention over there even though I’m not active on that forum at the moment.
I’ve been meaning to share this over here for a while and after seeing the post from
@Nick earlier today (see below) I thought I would get onto it.
If you’re struggling with tracking tokens and URL parameters, hopefully Nick's post above or the rest of this post might trigger a lightbulb for you the way it did for me.
When I first started out I’d be reading a guide or blog post and I’d be following along with this or that and just when I thought I had it figured out there’d be something like, “…don’t forget to add
&tid=[IMPRESSIONID] at the end of the offer URL”.
…and I’d be like, “OK, I get the [IMPRESSIONID] is a
PopAds token (and I’d give myself a big pat on the back for even knowing that much), but why is the parameter name ‘tid’? Where did that come from? Why isn’t it ‘sid’ like it was in the last follow along? Or ‘s2’ like that blog I read before?
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I mean, it seems like URLs roll off most affiliate’s tongues like they’re at Starbucks ordering their morning iced half caff ristretto venti 4-pump sugar free cinnamon dolce soy skinny latte… but I was a mess.
Then one day, I was setting up a new
traffic source and something just clicked.
Here’s what the new traffic source set up screen looks like in
FunnelFlux if you’re setting up
MGID:
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Which suddenly reminded me of something I’ve seen a thousand times:
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And the thing that clicked for me was that the registration form above is simply
a way for a website to capture information for its database, where it’s directing the user to enter the information it wants for its various database slots: “Name”, “Company”, “Email” and “Phone”.
And that’s when I realised that that’s what tracking tokens are doing – they’re identifying
the name of the slot and
the required information to be entered into each slot.
I guess what I really saw when I pictured an online registration form in my mind was that instead of requiring some dude to fill out a form with the data my
tracker wants (and he’d never do that) I can use URL parameters to ask the database from the traffic network or affiliate network (that has already captured information about the dude) to do me a favour and “fill out the form for him” so to speak.
But the problem for me has always been the way that different
traffic sources and
affiliate networks call their slots different things (even though they're tracking the same information), but then the lightbulb lit up and I saw this something like this in my mind:
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Which is when I realised for the first time that if I want a website to send some dude’s info to me then I just need to find the tokens the sending site uses that correspond with the slots I want to populate when I receive the data (or vice versa).
e.g. https:// www. coolevent. com/?name={whatchacalled}&company={yabidness}&email={inboxinfo}&phone={demdigits}
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Of course, the reverse is also true. If I’m sending the dude from my tracker to the offer and I want to pass the info I have about the dude, then I do the reverse:
https:// www. eventdirectory. com/?whatchacalled={name}&yabidness={company}&inboxinfo={email}&demdigits={phone}
Now I know some of you guys are shrugging between sips of your iced half caff ristretto ventis and wondering what all the fuss is about, but I just felt so much relief since this sunk in and I know that there are newbs like me who are scratching their heads the way I was in the beginning, and hopefully this might help them grow some hair back!
And just to have a bit of fun with the whole thing, here’s the story I wrote for myself when I was trying to test myself to see if I understood – it’s about a dude called Bob and his wonderful adventures in my funnel:
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I really hope it might help you in some way if you’re still struggling with this stuff – even if it just serves to give you confidence that one day, maybe right out of the blue, it’ll all make sense and you’ll finally be able to relax and just get on with it.
Welcome to affLIFT!
