Hello. I am trying to find a way to send my site visitors to two different pages, depending on the source of the visitor.
I have a product page where I sell a downloadable product. However my traffic comes from two sources, and I need to filter between those two sources and direct the visitor to the corresponding product page.
I get most of my traffic from search engines, but I am also going to become part of an affiliate program where people promote my product on their site. Traffic will come to my site from theirs, and if they purchase my product, they will do so with the affilate payment system, which is different from my main payment system, hence two product pages.
But I haven’t been able to figure out how to separate those two groups. Does this make sense?
A simple solution would be to supply affiliates with a link to your page with a $_GET variable which identifies that affiliate. That page would set a session variable, and redirect. If they came from another source they don’t see that page.
Thanks for this solution Jake. If I may ask, just to clarify for myself:
So my affiliates will have a link to my site on their site.
You are saying, in that link on their site there needs to be this “$_GET variable” and then when they click on that link and arrive at my site, they will see the specific page I set up for them?
Is that right? If so, yes that’s the solution I need.
Essentially, yes.
For example you might give affiliates a link like: yoursite.com/affiliate.php?affiliate=sitepoint and that would perform (a) an action to record that a visit had been made due to a link click via sitepoint (very useful for statistics) and (b) set a session variable stating the affiliate and serve a different page when it comes to payment.
This will also help you identify who your most important affiliates are - the ones with high traffic AND low bounce-rate.