What is Click References
A click reference or 'clickref' for short, is an identifier that can be placed at the end of a standard tracking link to differentiate between them.
What to use Click References for
By using click references it allows you to add a tracking reference to a link. Any clicks or transactions that occur through a link with a click reference can then be monitored through the various reports on the Awin platform. For example, if you created a link which had the click reference 'banner1' and then put this tracking link behind one of your banners, you could then review the specific performance of that banner.
There are a number of ways to utilise the click references:
- Most commonly and perhaps usefully, they can be used to separate different website activity within the reports should you have multiple websites on one publisher account. This can be done by giving links different click references based on the specific website where they are being hosted. For example, links on one website can be given 'website1' while links on the other website can be given 'website2'.
- Monitor specific pages of a website. By assigning a unique click reference to different pages on your website, you'll be able to see exactly where sales have originated on a particular site.
- Monitor specific posts on your social channels
- Monitor individual ad placements across your website to give insight into which placements are the most successful and well-converting.
Ultimately, click references give you the ability to see where your visitor has found the link to the Advertiser and therefore optimise the way you direct traffic to your site.
How to use Publisher References
You can pass through six different publisher references in any one tracking URL, consisting of any combination of letters and numbers you choose, up to 50 characters.
Here is the mapping table for all publisher references:
Click Reference
(only available for clicks) | View Reference
(only available for views) | Publisher Reference
(available for clicks and views) |
| clickref | viewref1 | pref1 |
| clickref2 | viewref2 | pref2 |
| clickref3 | viewref3 | pref3 |
| clickref4 | viewref4 | pref4 |
| clickref5 | viewref5 | pref5 |
| clickref6 | viewref6 | pref6 |
To implement a publisher reference, simply add &pref1=YOURREF to your links (where YOURREF is replaced with whatever text you wish to have).
example with a click :
https://www.awin1.com/cread.php?s=2087&v=6683&q=301&r=111&pref1=page123&pref2=user123
example with a view :
https://www.awin1.com/cshow.php?s=2087&v=6683&q=301&r=111&pref1=page123&pref2=user123
Finding publisher references that you passed through in links
You'll be able to see the click references you've passed through attached to individual sales in the transactions report as well as the click reference report, which shows the combined performance of each click reference.
- You can find the individual values you passed in 'pref1' in the Publisher Transaction Report.
- You can find the individual value of all the prefs you passed in the Publisher Transaction Report export.
- You can find the individual value of all the prefs you passed in V6 of the Publisher API
- You can find the individual value of all the prefs you passed in the Transaction Notification requests
- You can find aggregated statistics of prefs in the Click References Report
Please note:
- Please use all lower case for names of 'pref' parameters ("PREF" or "PRef" are not accepted)
- Publisher references do not have a character limit. However the aggregated Click References Report will only show you the first 50 characters.
- The 'pref1' value is visible to the Advertiser the transaction tracked for. The other publisher references are not.
- For deeplink urls, you should add the prefs before the click-through URL (e.g. before the p= paramater)
example :
http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=3&id=111&pref1=product123&pref2=page123&p=http://www.someproductpage.com
If your link management solution may require you to insert your click reference after the deep link click-through URL, you should add &clickref= at the end of the deep link. This only works with the standard clickref and not the additional clickrefs (e.g. clickref2) example :
http://www.awin1.com/awclick.php?mid=3&id=111&p=http://www.someproductpage.com&clickref=product123
- prefs are restricted to latin1 alpha numeric values. These are the special characters you can use:
!$%()*,-./0123456789:;?@[]^_`{}~
- The following characters are not accepted:
# - because it used as an anchor for page links/blocks
& - because ampersand is for URL parameters
+ - Should not be used
| - gets converted into an underscore
' or " - will have a \ added before them
