Closing the loop between Google Ads and affiliate marketing

Connecting traffic generation with the transactions they send to advertisers has been a long-standing challenge for publishers in affiliate marketing. Traditionally, a black hole has existed from campaigns publishers use to bring traffic to their own websites, and how that traffic actually performs when it moves on to the various advertisers they work with.

For too long, publishers have worked with piecemeal data and educated guesswork to optimise their own traffic generation, rather than being able to confidently understand how a user that went on to purchase from a particular advertiser was actually acquired in the first place.

This is the challenge Adtraction has set out to solve for its publishers with its new Google Ads Integration for affiliate marketing. With more than 60% of affiliate industry traffic originally sourced from Google’s Search, Shopping and to a lesser extent Display products, we knew this was important for affiliating marketing today.

Google Ads for affiliate marketing

Our new integration with Google Ads will allow publishers to tie the performance of their Google campaigns directly to the clicks and transactions they send to advertisers, finally bridging the gap between traffic acquisition and conversions in the affiliate channel.

The new Adtraction Google Ads integration for affiliate marketing works both for sending traffic directly from Google Ads to an advertiser, and the more common journey from Google Ads to a publisher website that contains Adtraction links. For the latter, we provide a small piece of JavaScript that automatically extracts the unique Google Click ID (gclid) parameter from all incoming Google Ads clicks and attaches it to the publisher’s Adtraction tracking links.

Conversions on advertiser websites that are tracked by Adtraction are automatically uploaded from Adtraction to the publisher’s Google Ads account. The Google Click ID ties information from the two platforms together, allowing publishers to use Google Ads automated bidding and optimisation features, which use historical conversion data, to drive better results from campaigns.

The Google Ads integration is available for all publishers in the Tools menu in Adtraction accounts.