A store owner may have external advertising or links that contribute traffic to his or her site. Advertising networks such as Google Adsense provide fairly detailed information on click-throughs, and even conversions when coupled with Google Analytics. However, sponsored links or forums or blogs may harder to track.

It is therefore possible to use the affiliate system to track such links, but setting up each link as a separate affiliate. This will require either using bogus email addresses, or setting up multiple new addresses. But it will mean that you can then ask your partners to use a specific URL you give them, so all incoming traffic, and the sales generated can be monitored.