Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track traffic and other activity on your website. In Refersion, you can also use Google Analytics to track activity on your affiliate registration page such as visits and form submissions. This guide will walk you through setting up a GA4 property for tracking the performance of your affiliate registration page.

To get started, sign into Google Analytics and navigate to your admin panel. If you’re already viewing a property, then you can do this by expanding the left-side menu and clicking on “Admin”. If you’ve never set up a property, then you should see the Google Analytics setup screen instead.

Once on the admin page, find the Create Property button.

From there, you’ll be taken to a setup wizard for your new property. For the first step in the wizard, give your property a name. A name like “Refersion Registration Page” would be a good way to remember what this property is tracking in the future.

Enter your business details during the next step.

Choose your business objectives. If you are unsure what to select, we recommend choosing “Get baseline Reports” as a starting point.

Next, you’ll select “Web” as the platform you’d like to collect data from.

Upon clicking “Web” a little popup will appear where you can enter your website URL. On this screen, you can also decide if you want to enable enhanced measurement by Google. We recommend keeping this enabled for the most reporting data.

Here, you’ll enter the URL to your affiliate registration page. This usually looks like subdomain.refersion.com. If you are unsure where to find this, you can navigate to your Dashboard and click “Affiliate Signup”

From there, a popup will appear with your default registration page URL. You can use the default URL or you can choose a specific offer’s URL. You only need the part of the URL highlighted in blue in the image below but using the full link is fine as well.

Once you have your link, enter your URL and click “Create stream”.

Upon clicking “Create stream”, you’ll see a box appear with code you can copy to your website. You can close this box using the “x” in the top left corner since our integration will take care of placing the appropriate code on your registration page.

When you close the box, you’ll see an overview for your new web property. Here is where you can copy your measurement ID.

You’ll paste your measurement ID in Refersion by going to Channels > Affiliate Registration Page > Third Party Tracking tab.

When you return to your Google Analytics dashboard, you can close the web stream details screen to continue with the setup wizard.

Upon clicking next, you’ll see a message that “Data collection is pending”. To test out your new tracking, you can visit your registration page in an incognito window to mimic a real affiliate. Your visit should be recorded in Google within 48 hours. For now, you can click “Continue to Home” to exit from this screen.

On your homepage, this is where you’ll be able to see an overview of traffic and activity on your registration page.

When there’s data populated for your new property, you can also navigate to the reports section to see more in-depth reporting metrics.

The reports section provides multiple ways to review the data for this property:

From the Reporting menu, under Engagement, you’ll find an events report. In this report, you can review metrics on individual events that happened on your registration page.

If you want, then you can mark the form_submit event as a conversion and track your conversions in the conversions report. Important note: Make sure you have enhanced event measurement enabled if you want to track form interactions.

Returning to the Reports menu, if you go to Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition, then you can review traffic information for your registration page. If you don’t use UTM parameters (Urchin Tracking Module parameters), then most of your traffic may show (direct) / (none) which may make it hard to tell where the affiliate found your application.

However, if you share your registration page with UTMs included at the end of the URL, you can get a better idea of which of your campaigns are working best to convert affiliate applications.

Below is an example of how you can use UTM parameters to track targeted campaigns:

Example URL format: https://your-subdomain.refersion.com?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=ad&utm_campaign=summer2023

First, you’ll want to set your default channel group to “Session source/medium” so you can see your sources and mediums in the reporting table.

Next, you’ll want to add a secondary parameter so your individual campaigns show within the table as well. You can do this by clicking the plus sign “+” next to the source/medium dimensions you set previously.

From there, search for campaign and choose “Session Campaign”.

Once that’s selected, you’ll be able to see a better breakdown of traffic by campaign.

Now that you're tracking your registration form's performance, you can start recruiting affiliates and seeing if your registration page is converting well or not. Check out how help guide on how to grow your affiliate network.