Conversion Tracking for PPC Affiliates

Posted on Sep 30, 2007 under Pay-Per-Click, Affiliate Programs

If you’re an affiliate promoting products using PPC search engines such as Google AdWords, you know how important it is to track the conversions of your PPC keywords.

Google AdWords has an built-in conversion tracking tool. Although this is an excellent tool, many affiliate marketers find is useless. You see, to use Google’s conversion tracking tool, you need to install a piece of javascript code (provided by Google) on the “Thank You” page - the same page the customer see after purchasing the product you (the affiliate) promoted.

As an affiliate, you don’t have access to the “Thank You” page , simply because the conversion doesn’t occur on your website. It occurs on the merchant’s website. You can, of course, ask the merchant to install the code for you, but many of the merchants aren’t going to help you unless you have a proven track record of sales.

So… how can affiliate marketers perform an effective conversion tracking on their PPC campaigns?

Many CPA networks allows you to specify a variable to trace the purchase/lead to a specific keyword (or source). I will use Clickbank as an example, although this works with many CPA networks…

ClickBank recently integrated a variable named TID (Tracking ID) to their hoplinks (CJ used SID). You can use it like this:

http://affiliate.merchant.hop.clickbank.net?tid=123

Notice the “?tid=123″ at the end of the clickbank hoplink? As an PPC affiliate, I need to assign a unique TID to each keyword. A good idea it to keep track of all your TIDs in an excel spreadsheet.

For the example above:


1. dog training = A1
2. “dog training” = A1prs
3. [dog training] = A1ext
4. puppy training = A2
5. “puppy training” = A2prs
6. [puppy training] = A2ext

When creating my campaigns in AdWords, I’ll assign a different Destination URL for each keyword in the following format:

http://affiliate.merchant.hop.clickbank.net?tid=UNIQUE_TID

When I run my reports in ClickBank, I can actually see which keywords are converting by looking at the TID column and match it against my Excel.

Although it’s worth it, this whole process can be VERY painful and cumbersome. This may look a little confusing in the beginning, but YOU NEED TO DO IT unless you want to fly blind.

I’m currently working on a solution to help PPC affiliates to automate the entire process, as well as providing you with some other benefits. HLOLA will launch on October 31st and it will provide advanced PPC conversion tracking of affiliate marketers. For more information, visit HLOLA’s website.

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4 Responses to “Conversion Tracking for PPC Affiliates”:

1. wesley said...
   on October 8th, 2007 at 22:42
   

   I’m very interested in this, I signed up for the mailing list. However, it seems that this is a hosted solution. Am I correct?

   Is it in any way possible that we can place the script on our own server? It would be an insta-buy if so.

   Thank you,
   Wesley

2. Ran said...
   on October 9th, 2007 at 12:40
   

   HLOLA will ship BOTH as a hosted solution as well as a script you can install on your server. As for the hosted solution, many people prefer not to have to install anything on their servers (also, not all marketers have a website). I’ve taken every measure to insure that your information is kept safe. All the data in encrypted so no worries there…

   - Ran

3. wesley said...
   on October 9th, 2007 at 19:26
   

   Excellent news and thanks for your fast reply. Now the only thing I’m worried about is the price :) Is it going to be affordable?

4. Ran said...
   on October 9th, 2007 at 20:54
   

   For now all I can say is that it won’t cost you an arm not a leg :)… Seriously, my intention here is to provide a very cost-effective product that even the newbie affiliate can afford.

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