There Are Several Ways To Track Last-Click Attribution

When tracking the performance of any campaign, from an advertisement to an organic piece of content, it is essential that you're tracking the user path via clicks and interactions. In most instances, your team won't get an accurate representation of their return-on-ad-spend or return-on-investment otherwise.

However, for new marketers, or business owners who don't have the time to manage the minutiae of their digital marketing efforts, tracking user paths can be difficult. But there are several tools that help with tracking user paths and attribution.

These tools include:

• The Facebook Pixel
• The LinkedIn Insights Tag
• Google Tag Manager
• And WordPress pixel plugins

There are certainly more tools available but, these are the ones that I've experienced to be the most useful. And yet, even with these tools available, there is still a common problem that you will encounter when conducting any marketing effort.

A Reoccuring Issue: "How do I track clicks and ad performance using platforms that I DON'T own?"

One common issue I've encountered when helping my clients is tracking the user's journey from their first click (usually on a Google Search Ad or a social media ad) to their purchase on a client's page that isn't hosted on their website.

For example, let's say you are trying to sell an online course. The course in most scenarios will be hosted on a separate platform like Thinkific, Kajabi, MemberVault, or Teachable. The issue with using any platform that you don't own is that some of them come with limitations.

You can't track all of the user information as you would be able to via Google Analytics, you can't install a Facebook pixel or a LinkedIn Insights tag to gain insights via their advertising reporting dashboards, and you have to rely on their feature packaging to use these features (usually at a premium price). Yet, there is a quick and easy solution to this issue—affiliate links.

The next time you come to encounter the issue of tracking first-click to last-click results for your user, see if you can set up an affiliate link through the external platform you are using. You can create affiliate links for each channel you are leveraging for your advertising (i.e. one for Facebook, one for LinkedIn, one for PPC campaigns, and one for organic content). You can then compare the data from your advertising platforms to the affiliate link performance on the separate platform you are using to host your products.

It's a simple workaround that I also just discovered that I believe can be of great use to small business owners in 2020. If you have any other "alternative solutions" to tracking first-click and last-click attribution, comment below and let's chat!

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