In need of some help.

I am starting a website that displays a number of different affiliate programs and I need some help with the tracking. I want to advertise the website using PPC and other methods like my newsletter, but as everyone should know, I need a way of tracking exactly which source of traffic is earning me money and how much.

My plan so far is to send users to a different landing page/sub domain depending on where they have come from, eg. If I have sent them to the website from my newsletter then the link would be www.my-domain-name.co.uk/newsletter1/ , where they would then get redirected to the homepage. I then want someway of changing the outbound links to the affiliate website so that I know which landing page/sub domain the user has come from. Eg if the user came to the website from www.my-domain-name.co.uk/newsletter1/, then I would want the “newsletter1” part to be added to the outbound link to the affiliate website so that it shows in the affiliate report.

Know how many people have clicked the link and where they came from is not enough as I need to now if they have actually earned me any money.

Hopefully you understand what I mean.

Ideas so far have been to some how carry the landing page code through all of the website links and have some script on the exit page that takes that code and puts it into the correct place in the exit url link.

Maybe using cookies but have never used these and don’t know how it would work.

If you have any ideas on how I can do this or you know of any software that might do it then please leave a post and let me know.

Thanks, Richard