Monday: Implement Tracking and Test the System The essence of affiliate tracking can be very simplistically split into two types of actions: clicks/hits and qualified actions (sales, leads, subscriptions, or anything else that the merchant decided to remunerate affiliates for). Clicks, or the number of visitors that an affiliate refers to the merchant, get tracked through the link placed on the affiliate side (website, paid search campaign, email link, and so on). Sales, leads, and other qualified actions, on the other hand, get tracked by a string of code (sometimes also referred to as the tracking pixel) placed by the merchant on their confirmation page. So, as soon as the end user, referred by an affiliate, lands on the "thank you" page on the merchant's web- site (Figure 10.1), the tracking is triggered, and both the merchant and the affiliate know that the desired action has occurred. 184 L B RU S H S T RO K E S