How to track your affiliate sales

Tracking is a fundamental tool within any successful marketing strategy. Even the most seasoned marketers, who were making waves with their campaigns pre-digital era, still used some form of tracking. Though I, for one, am glad we’ve moved past handwritten notes and fax machines (especially given the fact I have the penmanship of a seven-year-old). Nowadays, being able to track a customer’s entire purchasing journey at such a granular level grants endless opportunities for marketers to create, test, launch and optimise campaigns based on reams of historic data and past performances. Within affiliate marketing, tracking is your bread and butter and without it, this hugely successful and rapidly growing channel would face the same fate as our dear old fax machines…

So, if you’re thinking of launching your affiliate programme, looking for tips to optimise what you’re currently doing, or just fancy learning a little more about the impact of affiliate tracking and the constant barriers affiliate marketers are facing, grab a brew and let’s run through it together.

Why tracking matters in affiliate marketing

Before any actual activity can take place, implementing a robust tracking system is a crucial step, especially if you’re planning on paying your affiliate partners, or getting paid for the activity you/your platform has driven for a brand. Tracking = visibility and visibility = performance, without it, you’re left guessing where sales come from, which partners are driving them and how to scale your programme effectively. Each programme will undoubtedly monitor bespoke metrics based on your KPI’s, but there are core elements to measure which are vital in understanding how your programme is performing, such as: clicks, conversions, revenue, spend, conversion rate, ROI and AOV. Without this reliable data, you can’t optimise spend, drive high quality traffic, validate commissions, or scale effectively or profitably.

Of course, metrics alone aren’t enough to paint a full picture, and understanding who gets the credit and how that shapes your spend is where attribution models come into play. Last-click is the most commonly used and often preferred by marketers, because it provides the clearest link to the final sale. However, whichever attribution model you decide to use based on your partner pool and end goal is essential for ensuring partners are fairly compensated and budgets are being used as effectively as possible.

A key element, and probably the most overlooked part about the importance of establishing a reliable tracking system – trust. Affiliates need to know they’ll be accurately rewarded for the work they put in, and brands need confidence that every pound is pulling its weight and every new strategy is highly considered. Getting your tracking and attribution right from the get go reduces the risk of easily avoidable issues coming back to haunt you further down the road.

UTM parameters: The first step in affiliate tracking

UTM parameters are like the 10th plain black tee you’ve added to your wardrobe – a basic essential. A UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) is a little snippet of text within a link that tells you exactly where a click came from, they’re made up of five fields, source, medium, campaign, content and term, which together help you locate who sent the traffic and why.

An example of an affiliate-friendly UTM could look something like this:

?utm_source=publisher&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=summer_sale

Breaking this down into non-tech jargon:

• utm_source=publisher: Tells you which partner drove the click.
• utm_medium=affiliate: Shows it was affiliate traffic (rather than email, paid, or social).
• utm_campaign=summer_sale: Ties the click to a specific promotion.

UTMs and affiliate networks: How they fit together

Thankfully, affiliate networks, like Awin, Impact, CJ, and Webgains, already use their own tracking parameters, things like ?clickref= or ?affid=, to attribute sales back to partners. These IDs are automatically inserted when publishers create their unique tracking links for advertiser activity, so when used, this data is fed into the network’s reporting dashboards, making sure affiliates are rewarded for each transaction.

UTMs are different, however, and don’t typically come ‘built in’ to those network links; if you want them, you’ll need to set them up manually or configure them in your network’s settings. Networks like Awin and Impact allow you to add custom parameters or subIDs, which can be mapped to look like UTMs and aid with any discrepancies you see with network reporting vs Google Analytics (GA4). This means you can line up affiliate clicks inside GA4 or other analytics platforms, ensuring affiliate traffic isn’t miscategorised as ‘referral’ or ‘paid’, which is possibly an affiliate marketer’s biggest pet peeve, or it’s mine anyway.

Even so, UTMs aren’t perfect, they’re prone to human error and they’re not built for complex attribution across multiple partners or touchpoints. That’s why most programmes use UTMs as a foundation, then layer more advanced tracking software on top.

Tracking through affiliate networks

The majority of affiliates, whether that be advertiser or publisher, manage their activity through an affiliate network. This conveniently handles the daunting task of accurately implementing tracking activity and as mentioned above, the heavy lifting usually happens inside the networks themselves. These platforms run on tried and tested systems to connect a customer’s click to a partner’s activity or a sale based on their unique parameters. Traditionally, this has relied on cookies, but most networks now also support tracking pixels and increasingly server-to-server (S2S) tracking to ensure performance data is as accurate as possible in an ever-changing landscape of ad blockers, VPNs and privacy rules.

These are the metrics you tend to see through an affiliate network, aside from the standard clicks, conversions, ROI etc:

• Click-to-sale time: How long it takes someone to purchase after clicking.
• Transaction date: When the order was actually placed.
• Validation date: When the sale was approved, declined, or adjusted (important for managing returns/refunds).
• Device: Desktop vs mobile split, which can highlight UX issues or where affiliates perform strongest.
• Touchpoints: Which other channels or partners were in the customer journey before the conversion (more relevant when using multi-touch attribution).
• Voucher usage: Whether a discount code was applied and if it was tracked back to a specific partner.

The biggest advantage here is that networks are purpose-built for affiliates, their tracking is directly tied to commission payouts, meaning your partners can be confident they’ll be rewarded for every valid sale they generate. It also reduces admin on your side, as networks handle reconciliation, collate sales and their current validation status, and any clawbacks from returns or cancellations, so you can focus on the actual fun parts of affiliates (unless these tasks float your boat!)

However, network data can feel a little siloed, sure, you’ll get plenty of affiliate-specific detail, but not the full cross-channel view – the kind of insight that helps you understand the bigger picture and build strategies aligned with wider marketing efforts. On top of that, if you’re running multiple programmes across different networks, each with their own reporting suite, finding data efficiently can feel like a mammoth task. It’s doable, but very clunky, which is why many brands layer in affiliate tracking software to consolidate everything into one place and give you clearer, faster insights.

Affiliate tracking software: Who, what, why?

Whoever coined the term ‘diamonds are a girls bestfriend’, definitely hasn’t tried to manually consolidate the tracking reports of 15 different programmes across 4 different networks – affiliate tracking software, now they’re a friend for life. There is a range of software available, but I’m going to focus on two big players: Affluent and wecantrack, to understand how their platforms can aid with your affiliate and wider marketing campaigns.

Affluent

Who: Affluent is an affiliate reporting platform designed for agencies and brands running multiple programmes at once. It integrates with 500+ networks, very easily might I add, so you can pull everything into one place.

What: Affluent’s standout features are its clean, user-friendly dashboards, automated, yet highly customisable client reporting and its link scanner tool, which crawls affiliate links across the web to spot broken links or missed monetisation opportunities – huge for time saving and protecting revenue.

Why: Affluent offers a true bird’s eye view of every element of your programmes, making reporting seamless and allowing you to understand activity at a granular level and over a vast time period in one dashboard. This includes MoM and YoY views, which partners are driving activity, product data and more, the links tool is honestly a bonus.

Best use case: You’re an agency juggling 10+ programmes across different networks, rather than logging into each platform and painfully piecing together performance reports, Affluent gives you one login, one view, to collate client reports without all the hassle.

wecantrack

Who: wecantrack also pulls data from over 150+ networks, similar to Affluent, giving agencies or brands access to an overall view on a consolidated dashboard for a range of programmes.

What: Its real USP is how it connects affiliate data with the wider tools you’re using outside of affiliate networks, such as GA4, Meta, TikTok and even Snapchat Ads. That means instead of seeing affiliates in a silo, you can view them alongside your PPC, paid social, and SEO performance. It also provides full conversion path visibility and supports advanced attribution models like first-click, multi-touch, last-click etc.

Why: If you want to actually see how affiliate sits within your wider marketing mix, this is the tool, wecantrack helps you prove the value of affiliates when budgets are under pressure, because it shows how they contributed across the funnel, not just the last click.

Best use case: You’re running Meta ads and affiliates side by side, wecantrack shows whether affiliates are driving new conversions or simply assisting your paid traffic, giving you the clarity to optimise spend and strategies, while reducing duplication payments for the same customer.

Where GA4 fits in

GA4 has its place in affiliate marketing, I just wouldn’t recommend this as your main tracking solution, unless your UTM affiliate set up is highly robust. Affiliate traffic can still slip through the cracks, and with no direct network integrations, it’s unreliable for validating commissions and attributing sales directly from this channel. It is, however, great for a wider view, as you can compare affiliate activity against other channels, spot funnel drop-offs and see untapped opportunities where affiliates could help support, but that’s why implementing affiliate tracking software is a must.

What happens without proper tracking?

Managing an affiliate programme can be similar to having a puppy, you train, train, train, hours of effort, repetition and rewards. But once you move your eye off the ball, and your guidance and attention slips away, you’ll likely come home to an accident on the carpet! Affiliates programmes work the same way, if you stop paying close attention to the data and lose sight of performance through poor tracking, things will start to quickly unravel.

The first issue you’ll encounter is missed revenue attribution, sales may be happening, but if they aren’t tracked correctly, you won’t know which partners drove them, leading directly to over or underpaying affiliates, which damages relationships and risks disputes.

Poor tracking also results in skewed budget allocations, some partners may look like they’re underperforming (when in reality the tracking is broken), and spend could be pulled from the wrong places. On the flip side, partners who capture credit they didn’t earn might see increased investment, pushing you further away from incremental growth.

Worst of all, you risk losing partner trust and confidence from your affiliates, as it’s crucial their effort will be fairly measured and rewarded and if tracking doesn’t deliver that, they’ll focus their energy elsewhere. So, ignoring setting up, or consistently actioning what the tracked data is telling you doesn’t just risk lost revenue, it undermines the foundation of your programme.

What to track and what to avoid

At the end of the day, affiliate programmes thrive on clarity, you don’t need to send yourself data crazy by tracking every little thing, focus on the metrics that show true performance, and once you’ve cracked this, then go granular. Understand these and you’ll know which partners are driving growth, which customers are worth more, and where budgets should be focused. A quickfire of do’s and don’ts:

Track these:

• Clicks: Measures reach and engagement
• Conversions & CR: Proves traffic quality
• Revenue, commission & ROI: Confirms profitability
• AOV, time to conversion, refunds/returns: Reveals buying patterns

Where programmes stumble is by letting weak tracking habits creep in, these mistakes blur your view and can lead to a misdirect in spend and focus, frustrating partners who are driving results.

What not to do:

• Allow messy or inconsistent UTMs
• Track only vanity metrics without understanding the wider picture
• Not checking for duplicate orders, resulting in overspending
• Treating GA4 as your only reporting software, more difficult to understand where true performance lies
• Failing to benchmark against other channels, siloing affiliates
• Skipping broken tracking link searches or test transactions

The difference between growth and guesswork often comes down to this discipline, so focus on tracking what matters and don’t let valuable insights slip through the cracks. Do this, and your affiliate programme will be a scalable, profitable channel.

Find out more about how our Embryo experts can support your affiliate programme management.

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