I started selling things with OBS in July 2017, and by August I was trying to figure out their sales and marketing tools. Here is an excerpt of the sources of sales that I had in August 2017. Notice the one Facebook sale, that could have been anybody’s Facebook post. After that, I briefly started marking my links ?src=ERGFB so that I might know if it was actually my efforts that drove the sale or not.

23 sales from hottest_filtered
15 sales from FrontPage
15 sales from sub
13 sales from hottest
12 sales from also_purchased
11 sales from cab_col
9 sales from newest_since
9 sales from newest
8 sales from newest_recent
7 sales from email
5 sales from continueshop
2 sales from fp_u5
2 sales from recommendationsTestAB
2 sales from sgrc
1 sales from CMSEmail
1 sales from Facebook
1 sales from Newsletter_OFT_CTArpg
1 sales from newsletter_reviews_thumb

OBS has a FAQ that describes the various sources they regularly use like CAB is Customer Also Bought. Most of the time I just get things attributed to the FrontPage. The source information sets a cookie as does Affiliate ID information and this cookie lasts for about a week, which means that people might have seen my link and clicked it, but the credit still goes to a link, newsletter or some other source they clicked a few days earlier.

How do you do better?

A lot of publishers I have spoken to use Bitly or Cutly link shorteners not because they want to obfuscate the links, but because the link shortening companies offer analytics on their site. You can use the same link on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or whatever social media you enjoy, and the back-end analytics will show the social media site the user came from.

Affiliate ID

Even if you don’t use Source ID and put your URL behind a link shortener, you still need to include your affiliate Id into the original URL. Why use an affiliate ID? OBS pays 5% of every sale to affiliates for getting customers to the site. This doesn’t raise prices for the customer, it comes out of OBS’ cut of the price and is in addition to the publisher’s regular income for every sale, you also get the 5% from sales of other people’s books that came to the site within a week of coming to the site from your link.

If you have any feedback about this post or our books please feel free to contact us.

Paul

Evilrobotgames at Gmail.com