Support Center Affiliates Advanced Affiliate Tracking: Including Source...

Advanced Affiliate Tracking: Including Source Parameter

This is an advanced option which is not required in order to use our affiliate tracking links, please first read our getting started with tracking links article. Similar to google utm_source parameter tracking, our affiliate tracking link analytics can now be seperated by source by using the "aff_source" parameter.

By default every affiliate tracking url includes the "aff_id" parameter. For example

https://heatspring.com/courses/nec-2017-2020-solar-storage-requirements?aff_id=hfxdj8

The parameter is this part after the "?":

aff_id=hfxdj8

Where aff_id is the parameter name and hfxdj8 is the parameter value. The value here is the id for the Affiliate account so that always stays the same on every one of your tracking links.

The second, optional parameter named aff_source can be provided a value. Some examples could be:

aff_source=email
aff_source=linkedin
aff_source=cpcli

The second parameter is included using a "&" so this would be the full url for the email source:

https://heatspring.com/courses/nec-2017-2020-solar-storage-requirements?aff_id=hfxdj8&aff_source=email

As you start adding multiple courses and want to keep track of multiple sources and campaigns you might create a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet can be helpful for and keeping track of which source values map to which marketing campaigns.

The one important thing to keep in mind is consistency of the values you use over time. So for example aff_source=email and aff_source=e-mail are two individual sources that will be tracked separately. This is another reason why the spreadsheet can be helpful. The value also has to only use accepted url characters, so it's best to just stick with letters, hyphen and underscore with no spaces.

Here is a good general resource on url structure and parameters if you want to understand more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_string.

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