Forcing Clicky to track a link as outbound

First of all, you need to know that when you add a class clicky_log_outbound to a link, Clicky will track each click on that link as an outbound link. Now I always add a class track or aff to my affiliate links that I want to have tracked, for instance:

<a class="track" href="http://yoast.com/out/clicky/">Clicky</a>

Of course I could manually add the clicky_log_outbound class, but that's just a tad bit too much work, especially as most of my links have been "classed" already and I might want to use this class for other stuff later on.

Now, I add a tiny filter function to my sites functions.php file, this searches for links with class aff or track and adds the clicky_log_outbound class:

function clicky_outbound_filter( $content ) {
	$content = preg_replace('/<a([^>]+)?class="(aff|track)"([^>]+)?>/',
		'<a\1class="\2 clicky_log_outbound"\3>', $content);
	return $content;
}

add_filter( 'the_content', 'clicky_outbound_filter', 10, 1 );

That's it! Clicky will now track those links as outbound. Now let's set such a link up as a goal.

Goal Tracking in Clicky

For goal tracking you need to have a premium (read, paid) Clicky account, but it's well worth it. Setting up a goal is a piece of cake. You go to your site's analytics and then to Goals, Setup. You'll see this interface:

You simply name the action, set the goal URL to be your outbound URL, you could do /out/clicky/ or, when you sometimes forget the last slash, /out/clicky*. You can set up revenue and even a funnel, a required page before one can reach that goal.

Once you've done that, the goals will show, in realtime, in your Goals overview and in your "bigscreen" Clicky display.

More tracking power: campaigns

This feature becomes even more powerful when you combine it with another great feature of Clicky; campaign tracking. Clicky fully supports the _utm type variables Google Analytics uses, so you can track campaigns and terms within campaigns. That is, in fact, how I did the tracking in yesterdays post about WordPress Dashboard widgets.

Tracking Outbound / Affiliate Links with getClicky is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

How event tracking influences bounce rate

My buddy Avinash tweeted a link to a comment he left on a post that's actually an interview with him on the Bruce Clay blog. In the comment he talks about for whom bounce rate is a good metric. Michael Gray, an "old time" SEO and affiliate, who apparently hasn't learned much about analytics in all that time ( just kidding Michael ;) ), tweeted:

"As an affiliate or adsense publisher I want u to come and leave as quickly as possible how is that not a bounce."

Let me state this very clearly: it is not a bounce. A bounce is a visit to your website that doesn't result in a second pageview or a desired action. If you're an affiliate, the outbound click might very well be your desired action. To be able to properly optimize your campaigns, you should track these outbound clicks. The "proper" way to do that is to either track them as pageviews, with the benefit of being able to tag them as goals but with the disadvantage of inflating pageviews, or as an event.

Or, as the Google Analytics documentation describes it:

"[...] a "bounce" is described as a single-page visit to your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single GIF request, such as when a user comes to a single page on your website and then exits without causing any other request to the Analytics server for that session."

So, if you track your outbound affiliate clicks as events they wouldn't counted as a bounce. This way, these outbound clicks would be counted as a separate action, making the visit into a "non bounce" or, which is maybe a better name, an "engaged visit". This is independent of whether you use Google Analytics or another package, you could for instance use Clicky, a very good alternative for those of you with tin foil hats.

How to implement event tracking for affiliate links

In the examples below I'll assume you've properly hidden your affiliate links with a redirect:

Google Analytics

For those of you who use Google Analytics and are not smart enough to use WordPress and my Google Analytics plugin, you should be tagging your outbound affiliate links in a way similar to this:

<a href="http://yoast.com/out/vps/"
  onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','aff','/out/vps/']);">
  VPS.net
</a>

This example uses the asynchronous tracking method, if you want reliable tracking of outbound clicks like this, you should be using that, as it's a lot more reliable than the old synchronous method.

Clicky

In Clicky outbound link tracking of links like this is ridiculously simple, you don't even have to know javascript:

<a class="clicky_log_outbound" href="/out/vps/">
  VPS.net
</a>

Conclusion

In conclusion: please don't think you have a high bounce rate because you have an affiliate site. You have to tag your links properly, if you want to do serious analysis. The minute you do, you should be seeing these clicks appear in your analytics and your bounce rate go down, and you no longer have to claim visits that aren't bounces as bounces.

Event tracking, bounce rate and affiliate marketing is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

In yesterday's WordPress Podcast, Nathan Rice of StudioPress pointed us at a new plugin they've developed called Simple URLs. It works great, and I thought I'd use it to show you how to properly hide your affiliate links from Google. First of all, install that plugin. It will create a new custom post type and after that, you can very simply add a new redirect:

Creating a redirect with Simple URL's

Hit publish, and your redirect will work. The plugin will keep track of how many people followed the URL too, and show you in the overview:

Simple URL's overview and click statistics

Now, you've hidden your affiliate link. However, Simple URLs will do a straight 301 redirect, this is good for lots of cases, but in this case that would mean Google would still end up at the final destination, and we don't want that. So what you do is very simple: you go into your site's robots.txt file, and you add one line:

Disallow: /go/

If you didn't have a robots.txt file yet, you'd need to have at least one line above that:

User-Agent: *

This means that the lines below are valid for all search engines.

This will prevent search engines from following those links, and thus prevents you from being penalized for those affiliate links. Of course, if you're a bit more hard core, the best way would be to go one step further. Then you'd do a conditional redirect on those links: if it was a search engine spider, you'd redirect them back to your homepage or another post, if it was a normal user, you'd redirect them to the affiliate link. That's a bit shady though, so I wouldn't recommend doing that if you're not 100% sure you know what you're doing.

Now if you start doing this, it's also useful to add the outbound click tracking in my Google Analytics plugin. If you've enabled outbound click tracking, it will track your affiliate link clicks as events in Google Analytics:

Google Analytics for WordPress click tracking setup

These will then show up in Analytics, go to Content > Event Tracking > Categories, and you'll see something like this, as you can see the affiliate links have been suffixed with the label "aff" I chose above:

affiliate clicks in Google Analytics

Good luck making some money on affiliate marketing, and make sure to hide those affiliate links!

Affiliate Links and SEO is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Basically, I want to make more money, online and offline, and do less work. Now I could increase my hourly rate of course, but there's an inherent problem with hourly rates: they limit the amount of money you can make in an hour. So I've decided I'll do some other stuff. First is monetizing this site, a little. In the sidebar you see 2 banners now, I will sell a maximum of 4 spots in total, and do some paid reviews. I will only do paid reviews for stuff that interests me and you, though, so it should all still be relevant for you, as a reader.

Next to that I'll be working on more WordPress stuff, together with Adriaan Pienaar. He's built some great Premium News Themes for WordPress, which we'll be working on together. This is actually my dream scenario: making money on doing cool stuff with WordPress.

I've got some other tricks up my sleeve as well, also to do with WordPress, you'll be seeing those roll out over the coming months!

Making money online – increasing profits is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

They're talking about how rules were being created in the process of building up this affiliate program, companies that were doing SEM for them as well as being an affiliate for instance. At Hilton he didn't allow affiliates to do paid search, as there was a lot of competition from their own franchises.

At Napster though they are encouraging their affiliate to use search, and even to use their brand. They were using their own budget to fill in the gaps were their affiliates weren't doing anything, making their campaign look incredibly big. Napster doesn't exclude affiliats from using it's own brand in PPC and SEO either, making sure all the results on brand terms are either affiliate or Napster itself, which isn't working the way I see it (see for yourself).

He says they even go as far as sharing keyword lists with affiliates, and give them artwork. To be honest a lot of the issues he's talking about seem quite simple to solve from a technological standpoint.

I was looking at some of their affiliates and caught one javascript cloaking and copying their frontpage, and Jeff said they would probably ask them to remove it and "come back to the light side of the force". Someone else asked how important affiliate is for their program, an, without revealing any numbers, he said it was very important for their sales.

Another interesting question was whether they'd allow affiliates to advertise offline, and he said they probably wouldnd't, but that they couldn't make it work.

Kevin Ryan & Jeff Ferguson of Napster is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Basically, if you're an experienced SEO or SEM, you can make loads and loads of money by combining your knowledge with affiliate sites. There's a big growth as well for companies doing full service online marketing, including affiliate management, like Kris Jones's PepperJam does...

Onetomarket doesn't do affiliate management yet, but it's something I'm going to be advocating, as that would allow for a good integration of search and affiliate, which is in the best interest of our clients.

Combining SEM and Affiliate Marketing is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Affiliate links? Cloak them! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

I found this rather intriguing:

How can I promote the CPA ad unit?
Since this is a test and these CPA ads are not regular ad units, we are giving you more flexibility in saying things like "I recommend this product" or "Try JetBlue today" next to the CPA ad unit. However, you should still not incite someone to click on the ad, so saying "Click Here" is not ok.

SeekingAlpha suggests that, if this goes live, this might kill a few of the affiliate companies out there, such as ClickValue. The biggest opportunity I see, is that Google wil automatically try to put the best converting ads for your site on there, so you won't have to go through lots of affiliate marketing deals yourself...

AdSense affiliate marketing is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!