How do I see which affiliate links get clicked?
Add your affiliate domains to Affiliate Tracker, then open the Click report to see the most clicked links and posts over 7, 30 or 90 days, or export CSV.
Affiliate Tracker counts the clicks on affiliate links in your blog posts and shows them in a Click report: which links, which posts and which days. It counts clicks only. Sales, revenue and commissions are not in VeloCMS. They are in your affiliate network's own dashboard.
Installing a plugin is covered once in the shared integrations guide. This article is only the Affiliate Tracker settings and the click report.
Step 1: Choose the domains to track
Open Admin → Plugins → Affiliate Tracker. In Tracked Domains, enter the domains your affiliate links point to, one per line or separated by commas, for example amazon.com. Subdomains match too, so amazon.com also covers www.amazon.com. Click Save Settings.
What happens to a link
When a blog post is displayed, each link whose host is a tracked domain or one of its subdomains is rewritten to a redirect address on your own site. When a reader clicks, the redirect records the click and sends them on to the original address with a 302 redirect. A destination that is not on your tracked list is refused with a 400 error, so the redirect cannot be used to send people to other sites.
Only links in blog posts are rewritten. Links in pages, menus and the footer are not rewritten, so their clicks are not counted.
What is recorded
Each click stores:
- The link URL.
- The post the click came from.
- The referrer, which is the page the visitor came from.
- The time of the click.
No IP address and no user agent are stored. That means the report has no unique-visitor count, no bot filtering and no click-through rate. Every number is a count of clicks, not of people.
To stop one visitor from flooding the log, at most 10 clicks on the same link from one visitor are recorded in any 5 minutes. The visitor is still redirected to the destination.
Step 2: Read the click report
In the same panel, find the Click report. Under Date range, choose Last 7 days, Last 30 days or Last 90 days. These are rolling windows that end now. The report shows:
- Cards for Total clicks, with the change vs previous period, All time, Distinct links and Posts with clicks.
- A chart of clicks per day, with the days counted in UTC.
- The tables Clicks by domain, Top links and Top posts, each showing the top 25.
A post that has since been deleted appears as Deleted post. A click that did not come from a post appears as Not from a post.
Very large ranges
When a range holds a very large number of clicks, the tables and the daily chart use the most recent 20,000 clicks in that range, and a banner says so. The totals in the cards stay exact. A shorter range may fall under that limit.
Export to CSV
Click Export CSV to download every click in the selected range, up to 100,000 rows. The columns are clicked_at, link_url, domain, post_id and post_title. Only owners, administrators and editors can export.
If a cell starts with =, +, - or @, an apostrophe is added in front of it so that a spreadsheet does not run it as a formula. You may therefore see an apostrophe at the start of such a cell.
If you switch the plugin off
When the plugin is disabled, no new clicks are recorded. The report shows a notice above the clicks recorded earlier, which stay visible.
Where sales and commissions are
Clicks are not sales. VeloCMS shows how often readers follow your links. Sales, revenue and commissions appear only in your affiliate network's own dashboard.