Set up a goal of affiliate marketing
Hello everyone,
I would like to set up a goal of affiliate marketing. When a user clicks on to an affiliation button on my product page, a user will go to a forwarding page and then affiliate merchant site. I would like to track this process as a funnel. What I set up is as follows
My questions are:
- My forwarding page must include “forwarding?
redirectUrl=/link/”, does my destination url only include that?- my affiliate product value is dynamic and I would to add a goal value, but GA doesn’t allow me to leave the value blank to initiate dynamic tracking. Why?
- Are my setup correct? I’ve set it up for one day, but I haven’t seen any recorded data
Thank you in advance!!
Detailsidentifying_conversions
The short answer is:
Your current funnel goal setup in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is likely flawed for tracking dynamic affiliate conversions and the multi-step journey, as GA4’s native “Goals” (now “Conversions”) are based on single events or event sequences, not traditional destination URL funnels for multi-domain journeys.
The core solution involves using server-side tracking via Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Stape or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) combined with the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol and potentially the Google Analytics Data API.
You should capture the click event on the product page using the client-side GTM, pass it to your server-side GTM (Stape/GCP), and use the redirectUrl parameter to enrich the event data.
Instead of a destination URL goal, you should send a custom server-side event like affiliate_click with a dynamic value parameter, ensuring the value is consistently captured from your eCommerce system’s data layer.
GA4 does not let you leave the value blank in the UI because the UI goal setup is for simple conversions; for dynamic value tracking, you must send the value as an event parameter, typically called value, within your event payload via the Measurement Protocol.
The long answer is:
Your problem is rooted in trying to apply a legacy Universal Analytics “Destination Goal” funnel logic to the event-driven architecture of Google Analytics 4, especially across domain boundaries and with dynamic values.
For question 1, relying solely on a partial match of the destination URL, like forwarding?, is brittle and will only track the pageview of your forwarding page, not the entire affiliate conversion funnel.redirectUrl=/link/
The proper way to track this funnel is by defining a sequence of custom events.
For question 2, GA4’s conversion goal value field in the user interface is designed for a static, default value.
To track a dynamic affiliate product value, you must pass the value as a numerical event parameter named value when you fire your conversion event, such as affiliate_click
You must ensure your product page’s data layer exposes the dynamic affiliate value (e.g., commission amount or product price) upon the button click.
This is where server-side tracking becomes essential.
You should use the client-side GTM to listen for the affiliate button click and fire an event to your server-side GTM container running on Stape or GCP.
This server-side instance uses the Google Analytics Measurement Protocol to reliably send the affiliate_click event to GA4.
This server-side approach is cost-effective because it reduces client-side resource strain, improves data quality by bypassing ad-blockers, and provides full control over the data payload, including the dynamic value parameter, ensuring it adheres to GA4’s strict data format.
The use of Stape as a server-side tagging environment is highly cost-effective compared to a custom GCP setup for most small to medium businesses.
The reason for question 3, not seeing data, is likely a combination of the flawed setup and the inherent delay in GA4 processing.
The correct setup involves setting the affiliate_click event as a conversion in the GA4 interface and ensuring the server-side tag correctly passes the event name and dynamic value parameter.
For advanced analysis and better data hygiene, you should also integrate GA4 with BigQuery using the built-in export, and then utilize the BigQuery API to pipe that raw event data directly into Looker Studio, allowing you to build custom, highly granular funnel reports that clearly show the drop-off between the initial click and the forwarding page visit, something that the standard GA4 funnels may not adequately capture for a cross-domain journey.
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