How To Track Your Links in your Search Marketing Campaign

Jun 03

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Sid? Who the heck is Sid? SID. Shopping ID. SID. Same fellow, confusing headache… and I’m still trying to figure this one out. So my commission now stands at $11.68. I didn’t get a new fish signing up for my product, but my previous bite decided to buy some more things - and so the commission goes up. Nice, huh? Except I realize that I made a mistake with my SID coding.

Affiliate Millions (my bible to Search Marketing), says to ad the phrase &sid=whateveryouwant to the end of your URL in your advertising link. When I went to Commission Junction, it told me to add ?sid=whateveryouwant to my coding. I didn’t really get any of it, so I just added ?sid=TheNameOfMyAdvertisement to the end of the link in my Google AdWords campaign. I tried it out and when it moved me to Skype, I could see the ?sid=TheNameOfMyAdvertisement in the webaddress at the top of the Firefox window. I thought it looked peculiar, but I started to work on other stuff, anyways. My spidey-sense has been tingling all day. I spent a little time tonight trying to figure it out. Here’s the best I’ve come up with…

Here’s the code that Commission Junction pushed out:

blah.net/click-#######-########?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blah.com

I tried simply adding ?sid=whatever to produce this:

blah.net/click-#######-########?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blah.com?sid=whatever.

The problem is when I click on the link, I see: www.blah.com?sid=whatever in the browser.

I think my mistake was that it should have been &sid=whatever. That’s what I’m trying now to see if it works.

blah.net/click-#######-########?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blah.com&sid=whatever.

At least this way, Sid doesn’t show up in the internet browser anymore, which makes me think it’s working. I think that is that the & symbol tells the internet fairies in cyberspace that this is some sort of variable instead of part of the url. I think if I really wanted to go ?sid, I should have put it before the ?url part so that the internet fairies knew it was defining a variable.

Does anyone read this stuff? Is it even correct? How much computer geekiness do you really need to become a Search Marketing god? I’m finding a little basic knowledge of HTML useful when I’m plugging in links, but right now, a lot of it is trial and error. Let’s see how you like that Sid!