How to Track Affiliate Sales in WordPress (Complete Guide)

Tired of wondering if your affiliate marketing efforts are actually making you money?

Every successful affiliate program needs one thing to work: proper tracking. Without it, you’re flying blind – missing sales data, losing commissions, or overpaying affiliates.

But here’s the good news: tracking affiliate sales doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, with the right setup, you can monitor every click, conversion, and commission without losing your mind.

In this guide, I’ll show you exactly how to track affiliate sales in WordPress, whether you’re managing your own affiliate program or working as an affiliate.

Let’s get started.

What is Affiliate Sales Tracking

Affiliate sales tracking is the process of monitoring referrals and sales generated by affiliates who promote a business’s products or services. It works by using unique tracking links, often with cookies or tracking pixels, to record when a visitor clicks an affiliate link and makes a purchase.

Effective affiliate sales tracking is crucial for both businesses and affiliates.

It gives businesses clear insights into their marketing impact and helps them manage affiliates fairly.

For affiliates, tracking ensures they get credit for their work, motivating them to promote the business further.

Why Tracking Affiliate Sales is Important

Not tracking your affiliate sales is like trying to drive with your eyes closed. You might get somewhere, but you’ll probably crash along the way.

Modern affiliate tracking tools like AffiliateWP help you see exactly what’s working and what’s not.

Think about it – over 94% of successful affiliate marketers use tracking tools. Why? Because they know that without proper tracking, they’re leaving money on the table.

The best part? Major brands make 5-25% of their sales through affiliate marketing, and they track every single one of those sales.

Here’s why tracking your affiliate sales is crucial:

• Know Where Your Money Comes From: Track every sale and commission automatically, so you never miss a payment or overpay anyone.
• Find Your Best Performing Affiliates: See which affiliates bring in the most sales, so you can reward top performers and help others improve.
• Spot Problems Early: Quickly identify when sales drop or links stop working, fixing issues before they cost you money.
• Make Data-Driven Decisions: Use real data to decide which products, affiliates, or campaigns deserve more of your attention.
• Build Trust With Affiliates: Show affiliates exactly how their commissions are calculated, keeping everyone happy and motivated.

How to Track Affiliate Sales

Tracking affiliate sales isn’t just about numbers; it’s about gaining insights that drive smarter decisions and bigger results.

With AffiliateWP, you can analyze detailed affiliate analytics to determine what’s working and where improvement is needed.

This data can show you exactly how to make the changes that boost conversions and grow your business faster. Also, if you want to learn how to track affiliate sales without a referral link, check out this guide.

Let’s find out how to track affiliate commissions effectively, both for businesses to manage a successful affiliate program and for affiliates to monitor and enhance their performance.

How Businesses Can Track Affiliate Sales

Sales are how you measure the effectiveness of your affiliate program. It’s great getting clicks to your website, but ultimately, you need the revenue that affiliate sales bring in.

So, how can you track affiliate sales in WordPress?

It’s actually incredibly easy to set up affiliate link tracking and see detailed results from your WordPress dashboard.

Step 1: Install AffiliateWP

AffiliateWP is the best affiliate management plugin for WordPress.

It allows you to create your own affiliate program (as opposed to an affiliate network) in under 10 minutes and start tracking affiliate sales.

This great affiliate management tool will help you sign up the best affiliates (bloggers, influencers, SEO experts, and more), and provides real-time analytics to help you maximize affiliate sales.

Just head to the pricing page and choose the plan that best fits your needs.

Once you’ve completed your purchase, you can easily install the plugin following this simple guide.

As soon as it’s installed, you can use the setup wizard to connect your products, memberships, courses, and forms to AffiliateWP using the one-click integrations.

Before you know it, you’ll have a full-functioning affiliate program (no need for coding or technical knowledge)!

Step 2: Sign Up Affiliates

When you’ve completed the setup wizard, AffiliateWP will automatically create an Affiliate Area.

You can edit this by going to Pages and searching for Affiliate Area. The new page will appear in the search, and you can edit it just like any normal WordPress page.

Use the editable templates to quickly design your affiliate registration form, and set out your requirements.

Affiliate applications will show up on your Affiliates page, and you can easily accept or reject applications with the click of a button. Affiliates will then be able to log into their account from the same page and easily generate affiliate URLs to your product pages.

They need to copy the URL of the page they want to send traffic to and paste it into the URL generator.

A personalized affiliate link will be created, and they can use this to promote your products in their blogs, social media posts, email marketing, and more.

Your affiliates, like you, will likely want to track their affiliate links and coupon codes very closely, and there’s one super helpful thing you can do for them here.

Add AffiliateWP’s Custom Affiliate Slugs addon.

This will allow affiliates to customize their affiliate links to be easier to track. They can also make them much more attractive, which is a huge bonus for prospective affiliates.

Step 3: Track Affiliate Sales on the Referrals Page

AffiliateWP will automatically track your conversions and assign referrals to the correct affiliates.

All that’s left for you to do now is track affiliate sales by navigating to AffiliateWP » Referrals.

Here, you’ll see a summary of all your referrals, with detailed information on:

• Referral ID
• Amount
• Affiliate
• Reference
• Product Description
• Referral Type
• Date
• Status

This will give you an immediate picture of your individual affiliate sales, but what if you want a wider view?

Go to the Reports page to dig deeper into your overall affiliate sales. Click the Sales tab at the top, and you’ll see a huge number of real-time reports about how your program is performing.

Compare sales over time to get a good sense of how your affiliate program is progressing.

Step 4: Take Things a Step Further with MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the best WordPress analytics plugin, and it’s going to help take your AffiliateWP analytics tools to the next level.

It syncs with AffiliateWP with the click of a button and helps add more detailed affiliate metrics to your Google Analytics.

You’ll now be able to see enhanced affiliate data, including affiliate IDs, demographics, landing page conversions by affiliates, and other affiliate-specific data.

This functionality allows you to track affiliate sales on a much deeper level and use the data to drastically improve your program’s performance.

MonsterInsights is a perfect tool for any website, but it’s particularly useful when tracking affiliate sales.

Check out MonsterInsights’ pricing!

How Affiliates Can Track Their Sales and Improve Results

Tracking affiliate links as an affiliate can get tricky.

It’s easy enough when you’re a member of one affiliate program and only promote a few products, but it gets harder and harder as your affiliate marketing campaigns grow.

Because affiliate conversions occur on the merchant’s website, you have to rely on the sales data your affiliate program gives you. Hopefully, they’re using good software like AffiliateWP so you can get maximum insights into how you make sales.

However, there are some things you can do to track affiliate links.

Let’s look at how you can track affiliate sales and improve your performance.

Step 1: Install MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the best WordPress analytics plugin and it’s got some awesome tools for affiliates.

Its dedicated affiliate links feature makes it incredibly easy to track affiliate links with Google Analytics and maximize your insights.

Simply head to the pricing page and choose the plan that best fits your needs.

Once you’ve completed your purchase, you can follow this easy guide to install the plugin and get everything set up.

Now that you’ve set up MonsterInsights, it will be incredibly easy to access your data and turn it into meaningful insights directly within WordPress.

Step 2: Manage Affiliate Links

Here’s where we come to the big problem of affiliate link tracking: you have affiliate links from different programs all over your websites. They’re not uniform, so they’re very difficult to track.

To overcome this problem, you need to start managing your affiliate links so they’re easy for your analytics to identify. There are two great software options to help you do this, Pretty Links, and ThirstyAffiliates.

Not only do they make it easy to insert affiliate links into your posts and make them less ugly, but they also make them easier to track.

This is because they allow you to create a more uniform affiliate link structure.

Let’s take a default AffiliateWP affiliate URL – it’s going to look a little something like this: https://merchantsawesomesite.com/ref/3/.

But if you take a Shareasale affiliate URL, it might look something like this: http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?B=601672&U=123456&M=49337&urllink=.

To successfully track affiliate links, you need to standardize your link structure, and Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates let you do this.

So now, you can turn those links into something like this:

• https://myawazingsite.com/affiliate/awesome-product/
• https://myamazingsite.com/affiliate/cool-product/

Once you have the standardized structure (in this case /affiliate/), then your analytics knows what to look for.

Step 3: Set Up Affiliate Link Tracking

Now that you have a standardized structure for your affiliate links, you can help MonsterInsights to identify them.

To do this, navigate to Insights » Settings and click on the Publisher tab at the top of the page. Here you can add your affiliate path, so, in our last example, it would be /affiliate/.

You can add as many paths as you want, helping you to manage your affiliate links while still collecting important data on the number of clicks.

Once you’ve clicked Save Changes, you’ll then be able to track affiliate links by going to Reports » Publishers and scrolling down to the Top Affiliate Links section.

You can then expand on this report by clicking View All Affiliate Links Report. This will take you to an in-depth view of your affiliate link performance in your Google Analytics account.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ready to Track Your Affiliate Sales

Affiliate sales make up 16% of all online orders, and you need to get in on this by knowing how to track them.

With AffiliateWP, this is incredibly easy, giving you access to the affiliate data you need to grow your business.

Want more helpful insights to help your business grow?

We’ve got you covered:

• How to Set Up an Affiliate Program in WordPress (Complete Guide)
• How to Create Affiliate Links in WordPress (Simple Guide)
• How to Automate Your Affiliate Program in WordPress (Step-by-Step)
• 5+ Best Affiliate Giveaway Ideas (Ultimate List)
• How to Use Social Proof to Increase Your Conversions (7 Ways)

Now there’s only one thing left to do.

Have questions about tracking affiliate commissions? Drop them in the comments—we’re here to help!

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