(blares) - Hey there, my name is Matt Giovanisci, the founder of MoneyLab.co, and I'm gonna show you how
I track affiliate links using two free tools. One, Google Tag Manager
and two, Google Analytics. So let's jump on the computer, let me show you how to do it. The first thing you're gonna
need is Google Tag Manager if you're not already
using Google Tag Manager, I highly recommend it, you totally should. Basically it's a way to add
snippets of code to your website that fire on certain pages and fire when certain events happen. So I'm gonna show you my actual
Google Tag Manager profile for my websites and universities. So if we go to the tags, I have a bunch here but the main ones we wanna
look at are this GA Base Tag which stands for Google Analytics, this is your Google Analytics tag. So whenever somebody visits my website, this Google Analytics tag fires and you know, everybody's tracked. The other one I have here is the GA Affiliate Link Clicked Event. This is only fired when somebody
clicks an affiliate link and I'll explain how this works. So if we go into here, what's happening is we
have a tag configured called Google Analytics, and what happens is it tracks, the track type is an event. So we're gonna fire an event, we're gonna call it Interactions,
which is the category. The action is an affiliate
link has been clicked, and the label we're gonna
use is the actual click URL and this is all done
with these variables here that are built into Google Tag Manager. I will link to a more detailed description on how to set this all up, there's a great YouTube video that I use to set it all this up and
you can use it for yourself. But very specifically, we're gonna be tracking
these affiliate links and we're gonna be using the
Google Analytics property ID just to make sure everything's hooked up. But the most important part
about this is the triggering. So this particular Google
Analytics event is only triggered when someone clicks a link on my website, and specifically and again, this is all built into Google Tag Manager, the link that they're clicking is a URL that contains the word Amazon. So basically if anyone goes on my website and clicks an Amazon link, it gets tracked that that
link has been clicked. So that's how we use Google Tag Manager to set this all up. You don't absolutely have
to use Google Tag Manager but it makes it so much easier
to do this kind of stuff, and if you have multiple
affiliate programs, you can use matches RegEx and then put a little pipe here, and I have another one
called morebeer.com, is another affiliate program that I use. So I could type that in too if I wanted to do multiple
affiliate link programs. But for now I just have an Amazon, and I'm actually not
gonna save any of this. Discard, okay. So once you have Tag Manager
set up on your website, we're gonna go into Google Analytics and we're gonna set up
a goal for that event. We're here in Google Analytics and I wanna show you where
this is all taking place, so if we go to BEHAVIOR
and we go down to Events and we go to Overview, you can see that I have that Event Category here, and if we click on that Event Category, we have Event Action and Event Label. So the Event Action should
be Affiliate Link Clicked, there's one right there, and look there's 18,000, that's crazy. And then we have the Event Label which is the actual URLs
that have been clicked, they're all tracked here. And it's not just affiliate links I also track all links outside my website so that's why you're seeing that. If we go down to ADMIN, we're gonna set up a goal for this. So we go to Goals, under
your particular property and the goal that I have set
up is Affiliate Link Click and you can see that
since the last seven days there's been 14,000 clicks. So if we go into here I wanna
show you how this is set up, it's really simple. The goal setup is Custom, easy. The goal description is
Affiliate Link Click, which is what I chose and then I chose the type to be an event. And when you choose the
type to be an event, the next step is what event
do you want to be a goal, so even though we're already tracking this in Google Analytics through Events, what I've done here is create a goal so that I can add an average
value to every click. So again, I just wanna
make sure that I nail this. Equals to Interactions
which is the category. Equals to Affiliate Link Clicked. The label doesn't matter,
the value doesn't matter 'cause we did not add a value in there because I don't know through
the Affiliate Link Clicks what the value of a product is. But through some pretty
basic calculations, I've determined that every
single affiliate link click earns me at about 81 cents. And the way that I did that
was take a single month, and you can do is, the
longer period of time, the more data you have the better, but I took a single month and I calculated how many
clicks my affiliate links got and how much money I made and basically divided those two numbers to get an average of 81 cents per click. And so now that I have this, I can hit Save, which I've already done and now I have this actual goal set. Now what this will do, and I'm gonna show you
exactly how this works. So let's go back to the home screen and we're gonna go down to BEHAVIOR, and we're gonna go to Site
Content and then Landing Pages. And this is important
because in Landing Pages you have this little column
here called Conversions, which is what we wanna look at. So let's go ahead and pull back the date, let's just do all of May so that we have more data
we can work with, great. Now for Conversions, you
can select your goals or at least one of your goals, and of course one of my goals
is Affiliate Link Click. We wanna keep this sorted by sessions 'cause we wanna know now which pages on our website are the
best performing pages for affiliate link revenue
and which are the worst. So you can see, not only do I have my
affiliate link conversion rate, which is what we're really gonna look at, the number of completions or the number of times affiliate links were clicked and then the average
value of what I've made on this particular page
through affiliate link clicks. So again, it's not an exact number but if you look at it over
time it's pretty damn close and what we're really
trying to find out is which pages are performing well, great, and which pages are underperforming. So let's find out which pages are performing
abnormally well. So if we go to this advanced link, we wanna exclude pages that have the Affiliate
Link Click conversion that's less than, let's say 5%, so we'll just type in five and hit Apply. So these are the top performing
pages for affiliate links. These are all converting over 5%, so basically anybody who comes
to one of these web pages, 5% of them plus are going to
click on an affiliate link. Not really sure if they're gonna buy but again we know the average
click is worth 81 cents. So you can see my Robotic Pool
Cleaners posts, almost 20%. Huge, huge conversion
rates and that's because that page is basically
built for affiliate links. The real interesting part of this, and the real actionable part of this is finding out which pages on your website get basically no affiliate link clicks. These are your underperforming pages. So we know what the best ones are, great. But let's go and find out
what our worst ones are. So we're gonna exclude Affiliate
Link Click Conversion Rates greater than, let's say 5%. Now these are all the
pages that are under 5% and again, we wanna keep the sessions high because this post is
getting a lot of traffic but is maybe underperforming
with affiliate links. So this is a post we may wanna improve. Now 2.95 is pretty decent in my opinion so I'm gonna go ahead and really find these
underperforming pages. So I'll hit Edit again and I'm
actually gonna type in one. So I'm looking for pages that
don't even convert it to 1%. So you can see I have
a couple of posts here getting a ton of traffic, that's a lot of traffic for a single month and they're performing less
than 1% conversion rate. So what that usually means is that you either have no affiliate links or very few affiliate links on these posts or you have irrelevant
affiliate links on these posts. Whatever you're talking
about in these posts, people are not clicking
these affiliate links, so you can use, I have a
WordPress plug-in called Earnest that you can use to maybe put
some display boxes in place so that you can get more clicks. You could just add more
relevant information which would lead into affiliate links, or lead into affiliate
products you could recommend. But these are your underperforming pages and again the more data you have, the further back you pull these dates, the more enlightened you're gonna be on which posts are underperforming
but get a lot of traffic. So I've seen... At least for our site, we
have a list of these going. We have a list of our
underperforming pages and every day we go in
and we update those. We make sure that those
links are relevant, we make sure that we're
recommending good products and we wanna increase those
affiliate link conversion rates on those pages because ultimately,
that makes us more money. So hopefully this is helpful and if you need any help with
setting up Google Tag Manager to start tracking events
for these affiliate links, I will include a video in the description that you could watch that I personally use to set this all up. So good luck and enjoy.
