In the Daisycon system, you can find many statistics, including the conversion rates of the various publishers. As an advertiser it's also interesting to know how this traffic behaves on your website. By measuring in your own web analytics software, such as Google Analytics, you also gain insight into other performance indicators such as the average time on site or the average bounce rate of traffic that a publisher sends.
By looking at these indicators, you may discover that some publishers are sending through a lot of visitors who are still orientating themselves. These visitors may not immediately generate many transactions (the conversion on this traffic is low), but as an advertiser you would obviously like to have these visitors on your website.
How do you measure affiliate traffic in Google Analytics?
By tagging the affiliate traffic, you can determine per publisher (or rather per publisher media) what the bounce rate of the traffic is, how long visitors stay on the website on average and also, for example, the number of pages these visitors view. Interesting information, which you can use to identify good publishers.
You can distinguish incoming traffic in Google Analytics by adding extra parameters (UTM tags) to the destination URLs. You can ask your channel manager to do this.
Which UTM tags can you add and how do you do this?
An example of three parameters you can add to the campaign URLs:
| UTM-Tag | Example |
| utm_medium | utm_medium=affiliate |
| utm_source | utm_source=daisycon |
| utm_campaign | utm_campaign=%MEDIANAME% |
A link to your website would then look like this, for example:
https://www.adverteerder.com/?utm_source=daisycon&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=%MEDIANAME%
In addition to the above parameters, which are often used in combination with each other, the following parameters are available:
- utm_id
- utm_term
- utm_content
- utm_creative_format
- utm_marketing_tactic
Read more about what values you can associate with the various parameters here.
You can build up the url yourself by using a handy tool which Google has made available.
By adding daisycon and %MEDIANAME% to utm_campaign, you dynamically add the media name of the publisher. In your Google Analytics, you will see this as follows: "daisycon_medianame" ('medianame' is of course fictional). You can also choose to include other data dynamically. See below for the tags you can use for this:
%ACCOUNT% --> Publisher account name (e.g. "ABC123")
%ADGROUP_NAME% –> Name of the adgroup _(e.g. "Banners voorjaar")_
%BANNER_SIZE% --> Size of the banner in pixels (e.g. "120x600")
%DCI% --> Daisycon Click ID (Can be used for pixelless matching with a click, e.g. with direct tracking)
%LINK_ID% --> &li= The link ID of the link that has been clicked. (e.g. 12345)
%MEDIA_FILTER% --> Name of the media filter that the publisher is part of.
%MEDIA_ID% --> &wi= Website ID, more commonly known as Media ID (e.g. "22848")
%MEDIANAME% --> Media name as visible in the system (e.g. "Test Website")
%MEDIA_TYPE% –> Media type _(e.g. “content_site”)_
%PUBLISHER_ID% --> Publisher account ID (e.g. "12345")
%REF_DOMAIN% --> Referring domain of the click (if available, e.g. https://publisherwebsite.nl)
%REFERER% --> Exact referrer URL of the click (if available, e.g. https://publisherwebsite.nl/page/)
What do you see in Google Analytics?
The UTM tags will automatically appear in your Google Analytics. You do not have to set anything in Google Analytics for this. You'll find the data in your statistics overviews, where you can filter on the different dimensions you've added. Important to know is that statistics between Analytics and Daisycon will rarely or never fully match. We'll explain this in detail in the next article:
Why do Daisycon and my web analytics service show different numbers?