How to run an AppSumo Affiliate Campaign

There are many reasons why you want to track your conversions with AppSumo affiliate program.

As an AppSumo affiliate, you know that promoting the AppSumo deals drive revenues. Yet, there are some reasons why it is important to have very accurate data as to which subscriber is converting and for which deals. Further down, you will understand why the Google Analytics and Co, are not the right tools for that (unless you are an API Master Ninja).

Here is a breakdown of what you might (or should) be doing when you are an AppSumo affiliate:

  • Plan your marketing according to the AppSumo calendar.
    • Plan your social media posts through Buffer
    • Plan your drip email sequence
    • Plan your blog posts release dates
  • Write the product review, take screenshots and adapt the review according to your audience’s persona.
  • Prepare your drip email sequence and automation.
    • Content
    • Automation rules
  • Connect your marketing stack so you are 100% relevant with your messages
    • Retargeting campaigns
    • Conversion tracking: sent to your email marketing system to tick subscribers who have converted
As a general rule: A conversion is (almost) worthless if you can’t attribute the $ revenue to the entire data-set composing the conversion.

Depending on the type of campaigns you run here is a list of traffic attributes you will want to track

  • The traffic source and its attributes: Referrer, Page, URL, Keyword
  • The Social Media post: the post itself, the social network, message
  • The product meta-data: Product name, landing page, revenue
  • The subscriber: Subscriber ID, email address

As you might start to understand, that’s a lot of different type of data, produced by different systems which don’t necessarily “speak” to each others.

Side note: Large e-commerce or vendors have very sophisticated (and expensive) systems that enable them to be fully data-driven. Their entire organization relies on data to execute razor targeted campaigns, which sends the right message to the right subscriber, at the right time. Those systems allow organizations to not only measure their campaign’s performances, but to aggregate data and take their campaign optimization to the next level.

The outcome is clear: Increased revenues!

TrackingDesk is not one of those expensive systems, which requires an entire team of data scientists and well trained IT people. Instead, it’s a platform that allows any type of digital marketers, to run smart campaigns, while collecting marketing and sales data and distribute it to their marketing stack, whether Drip, Mailchimp or Hubspot.

In an earlier post, we explained the difference between Google Analytics and affiliate tracking systems, and how, rather than use one or the other, using both platforms would provide better insights and marketing agility.

But in a nutshell, the challenge is the following: As an affiliate marketer, since you don’t have the option to add your Google Analytics code on your advertiser “thank you page”, your “sales funnel” stops when your visitor leaves your site.

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As you can see, the flow is a one way street and the reason for that is simple. The conversion data is not heading back to twitter.

It stays in Impact Radius.

If you don’t mind doing some guess work and login to your affiliate accounts on a regular basis to see how much you are making, you’re fine. But, if you want to scale up your business, there is an other way.

To start with your Data Driven Marketing Journey, you will have to collect conversion data outside the scope of your Impact Radius account.

This data can be sent to your TrackingDesk account using our Postback URL feature.

How to setup your AppSumo affiliate account with TrackingDesk

Prerequisites:

  • Have an AppSumo affiliate account
  • Have a TrackingDesk account

TrackingDesk account setup

While the initial account setup requires many steps, it is done once.

  1. Add an affiliate network and Select Impact Radius from the Predefined list of affiliate networks.[ap_spacing spacing_height=”10px”]
  2. Add an offer: We consider offers as “brands” or “products”, but you can use one single offer – AppSumo Deals.
  3. Save the offer. you will be prompted to add an Offer Link. The offer link is used to promote a specific “AppSumo Deal”.
  4. Navigate to your Impact Radius account and head to the the campaign sections to grab your affiliate link.
  5. By default, the link you will get, redirects to the current AppSumo deal.
    1. You can either use the link provided – when the deal will be over, the same link will redirect to the new deal
    2. You can build your deep link to redirect the visitors to the specific SerpStat Landing page (https://appsumo.com/serpstat-2018/)
  6. Navigate back to your TrackingDesk account and Paste the Impact Radius link in the URL field
    1. You can set additional configurations such as Operating system, Geo Targeting, Browsers or even time sensitive information
    2. Time sensitive information can be relevant in this case since the AppSumo deals are time limited.
  7. After Saving, you will be redirected to the Impact Radius General settings
  8. Repeat this process if you want to add additional offer links – Useful if you want to promote the “all deals” page.
  9. Back to the Impact Radius affiliate network page, you can grab the postback URL, which you will set in Impact Radius.The TrackingDesk Postback URL will be called by the Impact Radius platform, every time your campaigns generate conversion.
    1. Head to your campaigns, pull the Action Menu and select Tracking Integration
    2. Add a Postback
    3. Paste your TrackingDesk Postback URL and Save (note that the required parameters are predefined in the Postback URL, so you don’t have to modify it).

Your TrackingDesk and Impact Radius account are now ready to talk to each others.

The next step is to plan your campaigns, which will drive traffic to your blog, or directly to the AppSumo pages.

At the end of this setup, you will be able to run a test and receive in your inbox, all the conversion parameters as if you had “purchased” a product.

To run a campaign through TrackingDesk, you will need the following:

  1. A traffic source – This defines the the origin of the traffic (you set it once, and you can run multiple campaigns on the same source)
  2. An offer – What we’ve setup earlier
  3. A landing page – Optional if you plan to send the traffic directly from your traffic source to the offer. If you have a blog and you plan to send the traffic to your blog, this is required.

One of the advanced features TrackingDesk provides, is the organic tracking script.

In short, it’s a script like Google Analytics that you can add via your Google Tag Manager or directly on your site, which will track the following:

  • All your UTM parameters
  • The referrer URLs
  • Your landing page URL and Title
  • Auto-generate a unique Event ID very much like the Google Adwords Click ID (GCLID)

If you are a blogger, this feature is built for  you since most marketing tools (if not all of them) use an auto-tagging feature sending the UTM variables to your URL.

  1. Add your Traffic Source: Select the Organic traffic source from the predefined drop down menu, set your site’s name and Save.
  2. Add a Landing page: From the Quick Create Menu, select Landing page
  3. Add your Site’s Name and URL.
  4. Set the number of offers links you will want to promote on your site: 1, 2 etc…
  5. Copy the Call to Action (CTA) URL – It’s the same URL except for the call to action number (last digit).
  6. Paste the CTA on instead of the outbound link you currently use to promote the AppSumo deal.

Read more about the Call To Action powerful features here 

  1. Create your campaign
  2. Select the Traffic Source you have previously setup
  3. Search / select the landing page – The destination URL where you want the visitors to land.
  4. Associate the CTAs with the offer(s) you wish to promote
  5. Save
  6. Open the organic tracking snippet
  7. Copy and paste the script on the header of the landing page (or site).

From this point on, TrackingDesk will track all the traffic going through the tracked page and subsequent conversions triggered by this traffic.

Useful tips:

  • Update your mailing list with subscribers who purchased a product
  • Understand which pages are driving traffic and sales
  • Understand which referring site or search engines are generating revenues.

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