What is an affiliate scheme, and how different tracking systems and software keep trace of sales, affiliate credits and everything regarding the affiliate program.

Affiliate scheme is a widespread way of making money on the internet by promoting services or products of a company and referring customers to this company's web site. If you own a web site you can join an affiliate scheme, which will use an affiliate tracking system in order to track your visitors, and the purchases he/she does, as well as the credit you have for the sale as an affiliate.

Affiliate program software is made for tracking sales, visitors and affiliates so that a company can keep trace of its affiliates, the visitors they send and the purchases these visitors make. There are many affiliate tracking systems, being the most common the cookie tracking, CGI tracking and the hard-coded HTML tracking, which is a little old fashioned.

The systems work in one out of these three ways:

1) Information is stored offline, that is to say, the affiliate cannot access information. It is comfortable for the company to run the affiliate scheme;
2) Real-time online information database where whoever interested in may access information;
3) Manual calculation of what is owed to the affiliates.

The HTML tracking

The HTML tracking system requires the setting of a new web site or page for the purpose of managing the affiliate scheme. Each affiliate has their own page with the stats concerned to their proper affiliate scheme. Thus, the number tracking is what differs one from another. A hard code of the affiliates tracking number is made in order to enable manual tracking and give each affiliate their credit for sales. Drawback: technology has surpassed this system, which is time consuming. Whichever changes that might have to be made, like the price of the product, will have to be made page by page, one by one. The more affiliates a company has the further work it will demand. But the downside on this tracking system is that the web site owner has no control over the statistics concerning one's sales. One ought to blindly trust the merchant. Advantage: very low cost indeed.

The Cookie Tracking

A cookie is information that is put into a visitor's browser when one goes to the merchant's site for the very first time through the link placed at the affiliate's site. It is in fact the affiliate number, through which the affiliate tracking is going to be made. So, every time the visitor gets back to a company's site, the visitor's browser will inform that it has a cookie in itself. The visitor gets tracked through the company's site. When someone orders something, it is possible to identify whose affiliate number gets credits.

CGI Tracking

This affiliate tracking system insert the affiliate's code into the URL as the visitor is accessing the site. CGI is the most used system, but JAVA and other languages also work.

Once the code is now a part of the URL - now the URL contains the affiliate's ID - it is visible to the visitor. But if the visitor doesn't type the complete URL with his/her ID in his/her next visit, typing only the main domain instead, there is no way to track neither the visitor nor his/her respective purchase. This is a disadvantage to consider at the moment of joining this affiliate tracking system.