Google Analytics Integration Guide

After you have created your wecantrack account, connected your affiliate networks and websites our system will be able to track your traffic data and attribute your conversion data to it. This enables us to push your conversion data to other tools such as Google Analytics.

We have integrations with both Google Analytics versions available. The GA4 integration feature is currently in beta.

Google Analytics 4 Integration Guide

Requirements
Step by step guide
  • In GA4, go to Admin > Data Streams
  • Click on your available website property
  • You can find your Measurement ID on the top right
  • Place it in the GA 4 Measurement ID field within your website settings in the wecantrack interface (currently under ‘show more integrations’)
  • Within the same section, click on ‘Measurement Protocol API secrets’
  • Click on ‘Create’
  • Give the API connection a nickname, e.g. ‘wecantrack’
  • Click on ‘Create’
  • Copy the API secret
  • Place it in the GA 4 API Secret field within your website settings in the wecantrack interface (currently under ‘show more integrations’)
  • Click on ‘Save’ or ‘Save and Integrate’

In order to gain more precision in terms of sales attribution, you can increase the Google Analytics session timeout to 7 hours (which is the maximum).

  • Go to Data Streams > Configure tag settings > Show all > Adjust session timeout
  • Set it to 7 hours

By standard GA4 sets 2 months data retention, we recommend to increase that to 14 months in order to collect more data.

  • Go to Admin > Data Settings > Data Retention
  • Select 14 months
  • Within the wecantrack interface, go to Features
  • Activate the Google Analytics 4 Integration feature

That was it! From now on your affiliate conversions will be integrated in your Google Analytics 4 account.

Please note that only conversions coming from clicks that happened after the installation of wecantrack will be integrated in Google Analytics. This means it will take some time to have a full coverage because sales from older clicks will still be registered in the networks because of the cookie duration but cannot be imported to Google Analytics due to the missing SubIDs. Moreover, GA4 requires around 12 hours for data to get registered.

General Information & Tips

Our Google Analytics 4 integration feature will automatically feed your GA4 account with your affiliate conversions data. You will be able to identify which of your pages, traffic sources and campaigns generate affiliate conversions and commission. Here are some helpful details:

Traffic Channels
Please note that if you want to analyse performance of traffic channels, we recommend to use the report under Reports > Acquisition > User Acquisition.
Within the Traffic Acquisition report you may find quite some conversion data within a row called unassigned. This is because the conversions occurred outside of the user GA session, hence the User Acquisition report is more useful for affiliate publishers.
If the Acquisition section is missing within your Google Analytics property you can find and add it within the Library (bottom left).

Useful Dimension
Some useful dimensions are as follows:

  • Landing page
  • Landing page + query string
  • Page path + query string
  • First user source / medium
  • First user source
  • First user medium
  • First user campaign
  • First user manual ad content
  • First user manual term
  • First user Google Ads… (there are multiple Google Ads dimensions)


Useful Metrics
Some useful metrics are as follows:

  • Sessions
  • Affiliate Clicks (Custom Metric)
  • Purchases
  • Purchase revenue
  • Event count
  • Conversions
  • Engaged sessions
  • Average engagement time


Custom Definitions

We also recommend to set up custom dimensions and metrics based on the events we fire to your Google Analytics account. You can find further details about these within our Google Analytics integration guide.
These dimensions and metrics are especially useful within the Exploration section of Google Analytics.Click Events as conversions (also in Google Ads)
Since we automatically fire clickout events to your Google Analytics account you can set these up to be considered conversions. This will then also allow you to import them in Google Ads once you have linked your accounts (further info in the guide).

Data registration
Please consider that Google Analytics requires 12 to 24 hours to register and process data. So after the activation you will need to give the integration feature some time.

Custom Definitions (optional)

Through custom definitions (Configure > Custom Definitions) you can set up custom dimensions and metrics to gain additional information regarding clicks and conversions from the data we integrate in your GA4 accounts. Here we will list the custom dimensions and metrics you will be able to set up with our standard integration:

Custom Dimensions
Dimension Name (example)
User Property/Parameter
Description
Advertiser Name
parameter
wct_advertiser_name
description
advertiser names as a dimension for wct_conversion events
Affiliate Link
parameter
wct_affiliate_url
description
affiliate links as a dimension for wct_conversion and wct_click events​
Clickout URL
parameter
wct_clickout_url
description
clickout url as a dimension for wct_conversion and wct_click events​
Network ID
parameter
wct_network_id
description
network id as a dimension for wct_conversion and wct_click events​
WCT ID
parameter
wct_click_id
description
WCT ID as a dimension for wct_conversion and wct_click events​
Custom Metrics
Metric Name (example)
Parameter name
Unit of measurement
Description
Affiliate Clicks
parameter
wct_click_count
unit of measurement
Standard
description
number of clicks on affiliate URLs
WCT Conversion Value
parameter
wct_conversion
unit of measurement
Currency (revenue)
description
value of conversions in selected currency of GA account
WCT Conversions
parameter
wct_conversion_count
unit of measurement
Standard
description
number of affiliate conversions
Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) Integration Guide Video
Affiliate Link Click Goal in Google Analytics

Once you have fully connect your networks, websites and analytics integration, the clicks on your affiliate links will be tracked in Google Analytics as wct_click events automatically. If you like you can also set these events as conversions, which will allow you to import them in Google Ads as well.

  • Within Google Analytics go to Admin > Events
  • Toggle ‘Mark as conversion’ on for wct_click

Now, if you have your Google Ads and Google Analytics account linked with each other, you will be able import the wct_click event as conversions in your Google Ads account.

  • Within Google Ads go to Tools and settings > Measurements > Conversions
  • Click on ‘Add new conversion’
  • Select ‘Import’
  • Select ‘Google Analytics 4 properties’
  • Select ‘Web’
  • Click ‘continue’
  • Select the ‘wct_click’ event
  • Click on ‘Import and continue’

We recommend to double check the conversion action settings. If you are using purchase conversions to optimise your campaigns we recommend to ensure that the click event is set as a secondary conversion and not primary.

Custom Google Analytics conversion setup

If you are using our Clickout API to pass click data to us we can also set up customisations which could contain information regarding products, brands, categories, lists, affiliate networks, SKUs and more. You will need to provide us the information you want integrated via our metadata parameter within the Clickout API. Please contact us if you are interested in this functionality and we will give you additional information.

Frequently Asked Questions

Once we receive a conversion containing our click ID from the affiliate network we send it to Google Analytics within 5 minutes. Google Analytics then requires some time to process and attribute the data. The attribution process usually takes takes between 12 and 24 hours.
Yes, you only need to make sure that you activate “Migrate from JavaScript Managed Client ID, under: GTM SS > Clients > GA4 or Universal Analytics > More Settings > Migrate from JavaScript Managed Client ID