- In this video, we're gonna learn
how you can track your affiliate links on your website
with the help of Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.
Hi there, and welcome to another video of measureschool.com
where we teach you the data driven way of digital marketing.
My name is Julian.
So, today we're gonna talk about affiliate links
and how we can track those
with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
It's actually pretty easy,
I have an example here on this website.
I have affiliate product, that when you click on this button
will lead you to amazon.com
and we hopefully get our affiliate commission
once the user buys this product.
Now, we won't be able to track the actual Buy on Amazon.com.
In this case DE,
but we will be able to track
whether the user click this button.
In any interaction that the user actually takes on our page
can be tracked with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
and for an affiliate site,
this click would be the ultimate goal
to actually track within Google Analytics.
So, how would we go about this?
Now, the first thing that we would do
is actually look at the link that this click points to.
We can see it here in the bottom left corner
or if you want at little bit more visual,
I'll go here on the Inspect Element
and, oh, where can we see it?
Set this again.
Right here we see the "a href" and this is the link
that this button points to
and the user will be directed to.
Now, there's actually a short link
so when you actually click it,
it expands and shows the full URL
but this can be ignored for now.
We just need to be able to recognize the uniqueness
about this link
because if you have other affiliate products,
we don't wanna go through and track them individually,
we actually wanna install one tracking
with Google Tag Manager
that tracks all of our affiliate links.
And if you ever worked with Amazon affiliate links before,
you know that this amzn.to is pretty unique
to this Amazon affiliate links,
at least the short links could also be amazon.com
and you would have these longer links here,
but the amzn.to should do for now.
We just gonna remember this and install our tracking
with Google Tag Manager.
So, let's head over to Google Tag Manager
and we'll start out by generating a click trigger.
So, let's go over to Triggers and click on New here
and this will be our Click Trigger for now.
We're just gonna name this pretty generic
because we're gonna change it later.
And as the Event, we're gonna choose to Click
and specifically,
in the second step you wanna look at Just Links
because this is actually link as we seen in the HTML marker.
So, let's click on Just Links
and let's keep these options checked off for now,
we're gonna get back to them later.
Let's continue and let's click on All Links for now
and create this trigger.
So far, pretty easy.
And we're gonna do now is going
to our preview and debug mode
which we can do under the Publish button
which will put our browser and only our browser
into a special mode
that will deploy our tags and our triggers
only on our browser.
So, we can head back to our page and reload our page here.
And we see, we get a little preview and debug console
that gives us more information about what is being deployed
by Google Tag Manager.
For now, I have a Google Analytics page view tag
that I'm ready to deploy.
Now, we wanna see what happens
when I click on this Buy product link
and I will do this with the command key press,
so it actually opens up in a new tab
and keeps this site loaded.
So, we do this with the command key pressed
and I clicked and we see a event down here
called the gtmlinkClick.
Once we click on this gtmlinkClick,
you see that nothing fired on this event
but we know that this interaction
is actually now being picked up by Google Tag Manager
and we can further work with it.
So, if this doesn't get picked up
in your Google Tag Manager account,
you might need to change up
your HTML console custom listener.
Next thing we can do is actually check the variables.
Now, the variables don't tell us too much right now
because we haven't yet activated our Auto Event Variables,
we would need to do that in our Variables here
and we see here, Built-in Variables
and here's also a special click variable
and the one that I'm interested in
is the actual Click Target
so the URL that the user is pointed to
but we can also activate all the other ones
so we get a full information here.
So, let's refresh our preview and debug mode, very important
and go back to our page, let's close these
and reload our page.
Alright, and I'm gonna click the Buy product button again
with the command key pressed.
We get the event again and under Variables,
I now have all the variables I have defined beforehand
and we see what gets filled and may not get filled.
In our case, the interesting part,
I thought was the Click Target but this doesn't get filled
because of the markup of the page,
and what gets filled is the actual Click URL
that features our URL with the amzn.to
which is pretty unique to our affiliate links,
and therefore, we wanna use this Click URL
to filter down our trigger and later our tag
to only fire when a user clicks on this amzn.to link.
Now, this might be different for your affiliate links,
maybe Click ID gets filled and you just need to make sure
that you have a unique point that you can base your filter
of your trigger in order to target
the right links on your page.
So, we'll go with this amzn.to,
just gonna copy this
head back over to Google Tag Manager
and go back to our Triggers
and let's first of all, click in here
and rename our trigger,
this will fire on a click event
and specific to amzn.to links
also called affiliate links.
Alright, now in the second option,
if you want to, you can choose Wait for Links
and Check Validation.
This will actually listen back to the side
and see if the user has actually clicked this link
and he will successfully redirected on.
This can be particularly interesting
because if the user list the site,
which he doesn't now in our case,
Google Tag Manager will delay the redirecting
for two seconds and be able to fire our event tag
that we want to deploy via Google Tag Manager.
So, this is quite useful for out case.
So, let's continue here,
and then, there's a new option that pops up
which will ask us,
when do we actually want to listen for this clicks,
and in our case, we want to listen for it on all pages
so we can just go ahead and click on Page URL, contains
then our domain, in our case, demoshop.com.
So then listen to all the pages out there
that are tracked.
Let's continue and here we will now use our knowledge
from our Variables to filter down our trigger.
So, we go with some clicks here
and choose the right variable
that we just saw in the preview and debug mode,
in our case, that would be click URL
which should contain amzn.to.
Now, you can be all fancy with this
and use RegEx as well.
We have a tutorial on this as well that you can check out
but in our case, we just had Amazon links
on our different products and they should contain amzn.to.
So, this is when I want to Fire On Event
into Google Analytics and track our affiliate click.
Let's save this trigger
and let's connect it to our tag.
For that we go over to tag and click on New,
you will notice, I have already a page with tag.
This is the normal Google Analytics tracking
that normal sites have installed
and we'll add another GA tracking,
this time, it will be Event Tracking
and this is specific to our Affiliate Links.
As a product, we go of course with Google Analytics,
we have Universal Analytics running on our page
and the tracking ID is already saved in a variable
called GoogleAnalyticsid.
If you wanna look at it up how to store in such a variable,
then check out our video on Google Analytics
on constant variables.
And as a track type, we'll choose Event.
Now, Events has different properties here
that we need to fill especially Category and Action
and our Category should always be Affiliate Links,
and then the action could be click for example
but we wanna get more relevant information actually
about what link was actually clicked.
So, in our case,
I want to know the actual link that was clicked
so I will go with Click URL
and this will simply take our URL
and input it here as an action
and then, we'll go with label
and this is actually one bucket beneath
the Action and the Category
so you can use that also to fill in useful information
although it's optional.
In our case, I want to know on which web page
did this click actually happen.
So, I will go with Page Path.
Now, for the Configuration is the Non-Interaction Hit
which is important
if you don't wanna affect your bounce rate,
set it to True.
Now, in our case, the interactions on the page
which I want to count towards the bounce rate
so I keep this on fault.
Let's continue here
and connect this all to our trigger
in the first step which we already prepared
and just choose this,
save and create this tag.
Let's Refresh our preview and debug mode
and go back to our page.
Let's refresh this as well.
Close this tab.
And I click on this Buy product button again
with the command key pressed.
And you see that we have our new event,
the gtmlinkClick, once we click on it,
we see which tags have fired upon this link click
and we can even look at this link click
and see why this trigger has turned true
because our Click URL had amzn.to in it,
and what information was our Event Action,
Category and Label filled with,
and these were dynamically filled with the URL
that this link points to
what the user has left to.
The category which we have to find beforehand
which was Affiliate Links and the Event Label.
Now, to check this all, we can also go into Google Analytics
into the actual Real Time Reporting
and on the Events, we should see our events coming in
as somebody clicks on such and affiliate link.
So, we see up here our Affiliate Links, Event Action
and the Event Label.
So, this works as expected and is now ready for testing
so we could also do a negative test
and click on another link
that isn't an affiliate link,
so for example, down here we have an email link
or on the home page, I think,
demo links here, there's an Outbound Link Click,
this is an outbound link.
I'll click this again with the command key pressed,
you get a gtmlinkClick,
but this time, the event didn't fire
and nothing was transferred to Google Tag Manager
because of how we set up the filter.
So, this works as expected
and is now ready for deployment.
So, we can go into our Google Tag Manager,
actually turn off our preview and debug mode.
And then publish this as a version to all our users
that visits our page.
So, we'll not only be deployed on our browser
but now on all the browsers.
You can again do a little test here,
go back to our affiliate product
and click on the Buy product button,
we have redirected on and now in our real time reporting,
we should see a new event with our affiliate link clicked.
Now, you can also see the data later
in the Behavior and Event Report
where you then have access to all the affiliate links
that were pressed on your website.
Now, this will take a while to populate,
so you can check back after a day
and we'll probably have a lot
of different affiliate links clicked
depending on how many users you have on your website
who clicked on affiliate links,
and of course, if these clicks are the main goal
of your website,
I would recommend to also set this up
as a goal for your website.
So, you can go here to New Goal,
choose a custom variation here,
should be our Affiliate Click,
choose the ID slot and as type, you would choose Event,
and simply the Category would need to be
whatever we filled in as a Category, Affiliate Links.
And we can save that
and we would also have this saved on our reports
as a goal and we could, for example,
look how many people from a given source
have clicked on our affiliate links.
So, that's already it
with this week's video of measureschool.com.
If you liked this video, please give us a thumbs up
and subscribe to our channel,
and if you wanna check out more events
that you can check with the help of Google Tag Manager,
then head over to our event tracking course
under measureschool.com/eventracking.
We will show you how to track more interactions
that the user can take on your website
with the help of Google Tag Manager.
My name is Julian, 'til next time.
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