Conversion Tracking on Affiliate Campaigns with Adwords- Please Help!

I have limited experience with affiliate marketing. But, some may allow to send variables to be tracked by them, such as the keyword used. You would see them in your reports, again if they allow this. If so, let's say you named a variable OVKEY, a column with that name would be in your report with each keyword used listed. It is the only way to be able to track what triggered a conversion short of asking them to put your conversion tracking code on their site and have it tracked by Google.

I would go even further than tracking the keyword. You should also track the PPC engine, should you use more than one now or in the future and the ad. Ads will convert at different rates. Just knowing the keyword won't do.

Note that the keyword sent by {keyword} is the keyword that triggered your ad, not the actual keyword used by the searcher. Also, you won't know the match type of the keyword but you could get around that by having each match type in its own group and setting a variable for that. More work but can be worth it.

To track the ad, I would use the unique ad id that Adwords uses. This way, you can run Adwords reports on that ID and consolidate more easily with your affiliate reports with software.

I think there's a special code to pass the keyword ID in Adwords but I can't seem to find it. Each keyword also has a unique identifier which you can retrieve in Adwords reports.

well in adwords they have already conversion tracking in build.. like glicd=xxxyyzz etc

Brad,

Yahoo Search Marketing AUTOMATICALLY appends the terms OVKEY=KEYWORD to the url when you have tracking urls turned on in the administration tab.

Google however works differently.

You have to manually append the term ?keyword={KEYWORD} to the end of your AD urls for it to show up.

What I suggest in my post is that you append the following to your Google Ads:

?OVKEY={Keyword}

This way by using the php function <?php $variable = $_GET['OVKEY']; ?> you can now access BOTH google and yahoo keywords using one convient method.

Make sense?

Important things to note:
- Tracking Urls in yahoo's admin panel must be turned on before they send you OVKEY data.

- Every ad in google adwords must be updated. The easiest way to do this is Adwords Editor desktop tool.

- Thanks for the link to my blog, jon volk dot com