If you are an affiliate marketer and you’re subscribed to one, or more, of the most popular affiliate networks, you’ll likely find ClickMeter’s TID conversion tracking technique very useful.

Affiliate networks generate a specific affiliate link to track traffic you send to a merchant’s site. This affiliate link includes data to redirect visitors to the merchant product (product ID) as well as data to identify you as the affiliate (Affiliate ID).

The following is an example of a Shareasale affiliate link: http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?C=1a&U=11341&M=01.

The most popular and forward-thinking of these networks also allow you to add more data to the link so that you will be able to perform some additional tracking of your own. This way you’ll know which of your promotional efforts are working best for you and the merchant.

For example, let’s say you’re promoting the same product on a blog, a forum post, and via Facebook. You’ll be posting the same affiliate link in all of these places and your affiliate network’s dashboard will just show you how many clicks your link received, along with any sales you created.

However, you won’t be able to tell exactly which source accounted for these sales. This is where a Tracking ID – also known TID, SID, CID, U1, AffTrack etc. – comes in.

If you are using an external service, such as ClickMeter, to track all of your marketing and affiliate campaigns, you may want to track all conversions in the same dashboard to see which marketing channel is most effective. Most affiliate networks won’t allow you to place a conversion tracking pixel on the merchant’s thank you page – or even allow server to server conversion tracking.

But using TID is a great way to link your ClickMeter data to the affiliate network data. You can include the name of the campaign and the tracking link you used in ClickMeter in the TID information.

For example, if you created a campaign called “Facebook” and a tracking link called “Promotion001″ then your affiliate link with TID should look something like this:
affiliate-network-link.com?affiliate-network-parameters=1234&TID=Facebook-Promotion001

In ClickMeter you have to use this as the destination URL when creating a new tracking link. You may also want to pass the TID dynamically; if this is the case please have a look at this FAQ: How can I pass variables (parameters) to the destination URL?

Using this method you will be able to know which tracking link converts most by comparing your ClickMeter and affiliate networks stats.

TIDs are variables that you can add to the end of your actual affiliate links to differentiate your sources of traffic. Most affiliate networks use their own parameters and have specific rules for tracking IDs. For example, many of them have a set character limit for tracking IDs. In general, you’re better off using lowercase characters. But for specific details, check with your affiliate network.

Related Reading:

• 100+ Best Affiliate Networks: The Ultimate List
• What is conversion tracking?
• How to use server to server conversion tracking
• The top conversion tracking tools for marketers

This blog post is about:

• TID conversion tracking
• Tracking ID for affiliate links
• Tracking affiliate conversions

Originally published: December 30th, 2014.
Updated: April 4th, 2018.