Affiliate PPC Tracking Question

[IdeaSponge]

I used to use Adwords quite a bit a few years ago but went away from it. Lately though, I’ve found some new uses for it and I’ve been playing around with it a month or so now. I’ve been having some success and would like to increase my efforts but there are some things I would like to learn to maximize profitability and I was hoping someone could help

I am very confident in my abilities to make good ads, find good keywords and overall, set up and run a solid campaign.

However, I do not understand how to properly track keyword to affiliate sales conversions. I can track my own pages and sites BUT I would like to know if there is any way I can track sales from an affiliate sale back to the keywords if I have no control over the “thank you” or “receipt” page. Is this even possible?

I am currently just throwing up ads using the affiliate url with my affiliate links. I have an inking it is not the best way to do it but I was just experimenting in the beginning and didn’t want to spend to much time. Now that I a making a few bucks, I would like to get serious and set everything up correctly.

Thanks for your help!

[Stangracer]

Hey Corey,

There are a couple of ways you can track your affiliate sales using the built in tracking mechanisms most affiliate programs offer.

The more automated way is to use tracking software. My favorites are Prosper202 and Affiliate Prophet.

Prosper202 is FREE and you load it on your server, it's a pretty good tracking software and since you're direct linking it has the added benefit of cloaking your affiliate link and still allowing you to direct link, which is really cool.

If you don't want to load it on your server you can use Tracking202 which is also FREE and its a service, just create an account and you're ready to setup your tracking, cloak your links, and start direct linking.

I like both of these as they allow for direct linking while you cloak your affiliate links and track your conversions.

Another alternative is Affiliate Prophet (AP), I like this for the AIDA it provides. AIDA is time on page and provides a measurement of how well your visitors like your message. This is good if your using a landing page as it provides a means to understand if your message is working or not. It's a paid tracker, but has some cool features as well. What's cool about it is it provides AIDA on a per keyword basis as well as a per site basis for the content network for instance.

If you want to test out affiliate offers, AP has a cool feature called AFF Spy which allows you to clone an offer and still get some tracking info to see if it converts, saving quite a bit of time and money in the process. Whats cool is you can use AFF Spy and Prosper202 at the same time.

I use both Prosper202 and Affiliate Prophet together to get some really good data and cloak my links.

There are several more affiliate tracking scripts on the market as well. I suggest starting with Prosper202 or Tracking202 for FREE to get things going. They aren't perfect but do a good job of tracking your conversions and protecting your campaign data.

There's a ton more benefits to both Prosper202 and Affiliate Prophet. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Hope this helps out...

Thanks,

Derek

[IdeaSponge]

Thanks a ton Derek. I will look into each of them.

[Catalyst eMarketing]

I was coming to mention Tracking202 and Prosper202 also. Those are the most popular 2 options I always hear about.

[xgogix]

Thank you guys for the information. Are Tracking202 and Prosper202 good tracking tools for Google Content Network campaigns?

Thanks in advance

[Stangracer]

Originally Posted by xgogix

Thank you guys for the information. Are Tracking202 and Prosper202 good tracking tools for Google Content Network campaigns?

Thanks in advance

Most definitely... You can use either for tracking content network campaigns.

You'll know which content network sites are converting, which is pretty cool.

Hope that helps...

Thanks,

Derek

[organicbrew]

Could you explain how the "search query tracking" feature works? I'm most interested in how it tells you exactly what a user searches into google. Is this accurate? And Does this work with direct linking too?

[warrior123]

Yep, Prosper202 or Tracking202 is by far the best tracking solution -- and it's free!

[Stangracer]

Originally Posted by organicbrew

Could you explain how the "search query tracking" feature works? I'm most interested in how it tells you exactly what a user searches into google. Is this accurate? And Does this work with direct linking too?

Hey OrganicBrew,

I'm assuming you're talking about the keyword tracking...

Prosper202 and many other tracking solutions use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) to pull the searched keyword and send it to your landing page. Google and other search engines as well can take the searched keyword and dynamically place it in your PPC ad where you designate.

Well you can also pull that keyword and add it to your destination URL. This can do two things for you. One it allows you to use that searched keyword in your landing page to make your message much more relevant to the searcher and Google.

And since you sending the actual searched keyword to your landing page, typically there is some code you add to your page from your tracking system that pulls that keyword and put's it into your tracking backend system too.

Pretty good way to automate your tracking instead of doing it all manually, which can be done too.

The keyword tracking is very accurate as it takes advantage of the Google system for DKI.

With Propser202 or Tracking202 you can use the keyword tracking feature even when doing direct linking, which is actually really cool. Some additional benefits as well like your data being cloaked really make it a nice tracking system to get started with and even use with other tracking systems to get the best benefits.

Hope that helps out...

Thanks,

Derek