Tracking Affiliates Referrals with Piwik (attributing a contact form submit to the correct original referrer) #10190

Piwik could be used as the backend of an affiliate platform technology, to help attribute to the correct Source (Affiliate / Website) a new given Lead (or Client / Customer / Contact Form submit / Email newsletter subscription / Sale / etc.).

Because Piwik knows which referrer has been used by the user (and this info is stored in a first party cookie) , Piwik would simply let you fetch (in JavaScript for example) the URL / Referrer that was used by the new client to find the website and convert.

The referrer/ attribution information could then be copied into your CRM tool, into the Email message sent to your Sales team, etc.

Todo:

• Write a FAQ or User Guide or blog post to explain this use case,
• Ideally giving a real world example

If you use Piwik for attribution and affiliate marketing, please leave a comment!

@mattab I would be very interested in this. I was thinking that I can create affiliate ID's add add them as campaigns, then am I right in thinking that Piwik would do that hard work of tracking everything else that user does, including conversion under the right campaign (i.e. affiliate)?

@silverark Yes it should work, let us know how you go? note: you will maybe want to credit the first referrer by default: http://piwik.org/faq/general/faq_106/

@mattab I've now implemented this, it works brilliantly. I didn't realise campaign codes and keywords were dynamic so it was really easy to set up. I just created an campaign name (affiliate ID) using the users User_id from another system then I could dynamically generate them a link. They can even track their own campaigns using the sub-campaign keywords. Thanks for the tip on the first referrer.

Also see: How do I create a simple affiliates system and track new customers and new revenue for each affiliate?