I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’d like to be able to track a little more of my affiliate sales. While it’s perfectly possible to track clicks on affiliate links, tracking which clicks actually lead to sales is another thing.
Until now, I’d evaluate pages by the amount of affiliate clicks they generate and neglect the fact that these clicks lead to sales or not.
Recently, I came across WeCanTrack, a tool that’s supposed to import the sales data into Google Analytics and/or Google Data Studio. This way, you’d be able to calculate the actual value of a page, an affiliate click… all in one dashboard.
I’ve been playing around with the tool a bit, added one of my affiliate sites to test it. In this review, I go over the features, things I like about WeCanTrack, things I don’t like and their pricing. Spoiler alert, I’m really impressed by the features this tool has.
What does WeCanTrack do?
WeCanTrack is a data processor that connects different data sources and combines them in one clear overview dashboard. The most important things WeCanTrack helps you with:
- Combine data from traffic sources with your sales data from affiliate networks. Your sales/commission data gets imported in Google Analytics and/or Google Data Studio. You can track which traffic channel, landing page leads to clicks and eventually leads to (the most) revenue in affiliate sales.
- You can actually track the performance of your funnels. By this, you can optimize, A/B test your funnels to get the most out of your campaigns. Something affiliates that use marketing automation will definitely be happy for.
- Advertising gets more efficient. If you can track how much a new visitor is worth to you, you can adjust your bids/audience to get a higher ROI.
- Automatic affiliate link cloaking. Instead of a long affiliate link, your affiliate links automatically get cloaked which have a more trustworthy look.
- …
How does WeCanTrack work?
1. Collect affiliate conversion data
First of all, WeCanTrack collects all your affiliate conversion data through API’s, Scrapes, Postbacks and even Google Sheet Files and CSV imports. WeCanTrack has integrations with over 160 affiliate networks so most likely, you’ll be able to automate this. For private deals with advertisers, you can always import the data with Google Sheet Files or CSV imports.
2. Data processing in WeCanTrack
Once the data is collected, WeCanTrack processes this data and connects the different data sources from the connected affiliate networks and your Google Analytics account. In WeCanTrack, you can see these connected data sources in one nice dashboard.
3. Data integrations
Once the data is collected and processed, it will be send to the account you want. You can for example choose to send the data to your Google Analytics account. Turn on e-commerce tracking in your Google Analytics account and you can see all your sales data in your Google Analytics account. You can see which source/medium has led to a sale as well as the click from which page has led to the sale. This way, you can actually see the value of each page of your site.
Aside from Google Analytics, WeCanTrack also provides data integrations with Data Studio (paid plan required), Google Ads, Facebook Pixel & Ads… and even Zapier.
The result
Now what does this really mean in outcome? Let me show you a few screenshots of a website I recently connected to test with.
Now obviously, you can import this data in Google Data Studio through Google Analytics as well. But when you’re in $120/month plan or up at WeCanTrack, you get an integrated Google Data Studio connection.
Inside WeCanTrack, you have a nice datastudio dashboard that combines all the data sources.
You can see a full demo datastudio dashboard right here: https://wecantrack.com/demo-dashboard/
Installation
Installation went very smooth for me. WeCanTrack has a clear installation guide. Since my websites are built on WordPress, all I had to do on my websites was install their WordPress plugin.
In short, the installation goes in these steps:
- Create an account on WeCanTrack
- Connect one or more networks as a data source in WeCanTrack
- Add your website in WeCanTrack (with Google Analytics Tracking code) as a data source
- Connect your website (with WordPress, you can just install the WeCanTrack plugin)
- Enable eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics
WeCanTrack has a comprehensive installation guide that explains every step.
What I like about WeCanTrack
Tracking data is one thing. Interpreting the data and actually doing something with it is another thing. So as an affiliate there are many things you can do with all this data. I’ll give you a few examples of things that immediately come to mind with me:
- Advertising: since you can actually calculate how much a visit to one of your landing pages is worth, you can use this for advertising purposes. Let’s say a visitor to your site has an average value of $0,15. With this information, you might want to set up a Google Search Campaign and bid up to $0,10 for a click. Theoretically, you’ll make $0,05 for every visitor through Google Ads. Same goes for Facebook Ads campaigns.
- One dashboard where everything comes together. For me this is huge. In Datastudio you can now import all the data you want as an affiliate. Google Analytics data, Ahrefs data through Supermetrics, Sales/Commission data through WeCanTrack, Search Console data, Active Campaign data,… it just all comes together.
- Selling your affiliate website. Whenever you want to sell an affiliate site, the buyer would want to see a lot of performance data. By setting up a Data Studio report and importing the data through WeCanTrack, everything can be automated. Whenever you’d want to sell a website, all you have to do is send the Data Studio dashboard to the potential buyer and he has access to all the data he/she needs. That might save you a lot of time in gathering and combining all the data and having to update it all the time.
- Keeping track of approved/rejected sales. Not only does WeCanTrack tracks all the sales and commissions, you can also see which sales are approved and rejected. That means that in one dashboard, you can see how much your website and even portfolio of sites has actually made.
Pricing
WeCanTrack offers currently 4 plans. A free plan, $60/month, $120/month and $240/month.
- The free plan offers connections with up to 5 network accounts, 50 conversions, 2.000 clicks and 8.000 sessions.
- The $60/month plan offers connections with up to 20 network accounts, 500 conversions, 25.000 clicks and 100.000 sessions.
- The $120/month plan offers connections with unlimited network accounts, up to 5.000 conversions, 125.000 clicks and 500.000 sessions. On top of that, you also get integrations with Data Studio & BigQuery, Custom & email reports, API Reports & sales that are not available for the lower plans.
- The $240/month plan offers connections with unlimited network accounts, up to 50.000 conversions, 750.000 clicks and 3.000.000 sessions. All the features from the $120/month plan are obviously available in this plan as well.
You can start with a 30-day free trial. After these 30 days, you’ll automatically be put in one of the plans according to your data. If your traffic and performance fluctuates, you’ll be automatically sorted in another plan. For example if you have a spike in traffic and performance during holiday season, you’ll be put in a higher plan during this period and in a lower plan during low-season months.
Things that I’d like to see improved
While I’m really impressed by the features that are offered by WeCanTrack, there are a few things that I’d like to see a solution for:
- With some affiliate networks (like the one of bol.com), the data from all your websites gets imported. For now, there doesn’t seem to be an option to import data from only 1 website. A solution would be to create one account on the network for every website. But that would result in a seperate invoice per account and I’m pretty sure Bol.com only wants you to have one account per company. So whenever you connect Bol.com to WeCanTrack, the conversion data of all your websites within Bol.com will be imported.
- Option to choose the plan yourself. Even though it’s convenient WeCanTrack automatically sorts you in a pricing plan, some people might want to choose the plan themselves. Especially if you got switched over to a higher plan with only a few sessions/clicks/sales to be sorted in a lower plan.
- Ditch the sessions threshold. While the sessions threshold is not really a concern for me personally, for people with display ads revenue as their main monetisation/goal, the session threshold might be annoying. A website that has 150.000 sessions a month and only makes a few affiliate sales per month, would be sorted in the $120/month plan. That might be rather expensive for tracking a few affiliate sales.
Important to keep in mind
When you’ve just signed up at WeCanTrack, you might notice that not all the data immediately gets imported in your Google Analytics account. That’s because only clicks after installation of WeCanTrack can be contributed to sales. With the cookie duration sometimes, sales might come in that are not being registered in Google Analytics.