Tracking Conversions by Post Author

My site has multiple authors. I am going to have some authors include in their posts the link to signup to be a paid member. If I want to track how many signups result from the signup from their link (and not another author) – is their a best practice way to track that with Google Analytics or similar?

Hi Jim,

It sounds like you want something akin to affiliate tracking. In that case we would recommend using iDevAffiliate or ShareASale, both of which integrate with s2Member.

If you don’t want to use an affiliate system, you’d have to write some custom code to do the tracking. You may also be able to use Google Analytics, but tracking the actual signups themselves (as opposed to just number of visits to the signup link) would be a little more tricky with analytics (I believe it can be done using Google Analytics Goals, but you’d need to create separate goals for each author to track the individual links).

Thanks Raam – I am talking about doing this all on my own site, tracking my own subscribers from my own authors, no true affiliates involved. Would iDevaffil or Shareasale still work then?

I was going to get a button coded in the edit-post UI that auto-inserts code to block premium content and inserts the signup link/banner. I will have the button add a tag to the link with the post ID and author ID I think. I would think I could create a goal in Google Analalytics with the “Thanks for subscribing” confirm page, and then manually see which incoming links led to that page? Would that work you think?

Jim,

If you’re just trying to count number of signups from a specific link (i.e., no money or commissions are involved), then using affiliate software might be overkill and I’d suggest either experimenting with Google Analytics or writing a little PHP that gets processed whenever a new signup happens and tracks things that way (see Dashboard -› s2Member® -› API / Tracking -› Signup Tracking Codes).

Cool it looks like if I track %%subscr_id%% with the author’s post IDs, I can see how long each subscriber stays a member and reward authors based on recurring commissions until that member they’ve signed up cancels. Is that right?

Yes, that sounds right, Jim. :)

OK so dumb question here. If I am tracking %%subscr_id% with the author’s post IDs – where does this get logged? Does s2member have its own logs or does this get stored in mysql or do I potentially pass this info into Google Analytics somehow? I don’t need this automated but I’d like to be able to say, quarterly, calculate revenue from membership signups and figure out which authors brought in what portion of those signups (not just the initial signup but lifetime revenues from each subscriber). Does that make sense? I would use that to reward bonuses to authors.

You’d need to store that information somewhere yourself, as this would be a custom solution. You could potentially create an additional table in the database to maintain all the information you need, updating it when things happen, such as signup, cancellation, etc.

While s2Member provides the hooks and tools (such has signup tracking) necessary to accomplish what you’re trying to do, the features as you need them don’t exist, so you’ll need to create them with custom code.

My developer tells me we can use something like WP Affiliate Platform, so I am going to try that. http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wordpress-affiliate-platform-plugin-simple-affiliate-program-for-wordpress-blogsite-1474