Keyword Conversion Tracking Demystified By Amir Darwish
Disclaimer: This ebook is for educational and information purposes only. In no way may will I be liable for any damages whatsoever that you incur by reading or implementing this tutorial. Use at your own risk. This information is for your personal use only. This book comes with MRR rights. You may pass it out, sell, but you may not reproduce it in part or whole without prior written permission from the author. For any questions contact: support@xconversions.com
Thank you for downloading this important tutorial on keyword tracking. You, my friend, have made a very smart move by taking the first step to tracking your sales. Tracking really can t be overemphasized enough and it s very interesting to see how many people neglect it. A lot of people can t be bothered to put in the necessary time and effort to track their advertising. But you know what this means for you don t you? If you do tracking right, you will have the edge over the other marketers you are competing with and you ll be ahead of the game on your way to market domination. This tutorial will focus on one very important aspect of sales tracking, and that is keyword tracking, ie which keywords convert into sales for you. If you haven t heard already, the Rich Jerk has released a program that revolves around this same concept of keyword conversion tracking. Only 500 copies were released. You will learn all you need to do proper tracking for free in this report. Additionally, I have developed a very powerful software to automate your conversion tracking at the search phrase level, and the country level. My software will also allow you to track your opt-ins. Are you excited? Do you see the potential? Let me explain. When you advertise in google, you advertise broad match terms, phrase match terms with quotes and exact match terms with brackets []. Now when google tells you someone clicked on one of your broad match terms, do you have any clue what term they clicked on? My software will tell you EXACTLY what they typed into the search engine the exact way they typed it. That will give you incredible insight into your market. You will learn exactly what the people clicking your ad want. This data is really invaluable. You ll also be able to come up with better negative keywords. Using my software, Xtreme Conversions, you will also be able to track your sales according to the country. You ll be able to tell which country generates the most sales. Some traffic from certain countries just won t convert.
All this without having to put anything on the merchant s page! No more running around begging the merchants to put your conversion code on their pages. Armed will all this data, you can turn your campaigns into very lean money making machines with massive ROI. Now, aside from the cost savings and the massive ROI, do you know what the implications for your competition is? You can leave your competition in the dust. You will be able to raise your CPC for the keywords that convert for you. You can outbid your competitors, get higher positions, eliminate some of them altogether if you know how. To put it simply, this powerful information will now give you a real edge and will make the PPC game a lot more fun. So what s the difference between using a program that automates the process such as Xtreme Conversions and doing it manually? Doing it manually you ll be able to get 80% of the features of these automated programs, but it will also be a tedious and time consuming process. It s still not to be ignored if you can t afford Xtreme Conversions at this moment. Enough said. Let s start with the meat and potatoes. Amir Darwish support@xconversions.com
Table of Contents Introduction Overview Conversion Tracking Step by Step Step 1: Assign a Unique Id For Each Keyword Step 2: Include Each Unique Id in The Keyword s URL Direct Linking Example Step 3: Adjust the Affiliate Links on the Landing Page Simplified Technical Explanation Commission Junction Tracking Example Aweber Tracking Example Next Steps
Introduction Many merchants and affiliate networks allow you to include a tracking id with your affiliate links. You can then associate those tracking id with that which you wish to track. For example if you have two landing pages, landing page1 and landing page2, you can use two tracking ids to distinguish which landing page is generating sales for you. That is quite easy, and if you haven t been doing so already shame on you. Split testing and tracking is what separates the men from the boys when it comes to affiliate marketing so roll up your sleeves and get started. In a similar way, you can give a separate tracking id for each keyword that you are advertising under in your PPC campaigns. Then, you ll be able to track the exact keywords that convert into sales for you. I can t overemphasize how important this is. If you don t understand its importance, believe me, any serious PPC marketer knows that s the difference between a break even campaign and a campaign that produces upwards of $500+/month. Ok, so by now you should ve understood that if we can somehow assign a unique tracking id for our affiliate campaigns based on the keywords that generated the click, we will be able to find out exactly which keywords convert into sales and which ones don t. Overview of the Process Ok, now here s the plan. Google allows you to assign a separate URL for each one of your keywords in your ad group. If you go to your google campaign and click on edit keywords,
You will be taken to the following screen:
You can actually assign a specific URL for each keyword in the following format: dog training**0.2**http://dog1.sitstay.hop.clickbank.net?tid=id1 dog behavior training**0.2**http://dog1.yyy.sitstay.clickbank.net?tid=id2 dog house training**0.25**http://dog1.sitstay.hop.clickbank.net?tid=id3 You can then enter that in the Edit Keywords and CPC screen: It s really not very difficult at all. Let s get started. I will take a sample campaign and walk through the steps showing you exactly what to do.
Conversion Tracking Step By Step Step 1: Assign a Unique Id for each of your keywords Copy and paste your keywords in Excel and assign a unique id to each one of your keywords. Make sure to save the excel sheet for tracking purposes. Here s what I have in my excel sheet: You can make your tracking ids more descriptive. They can contain letters of the alphabet, but don t make them too long. The important thing is that you know which id corresponds to which keyword. Step 2: Include each Unique Id in The Keyword s URL
Now we re going to take the direct id that we created in our excel sheet and enter it in google next to each of our keywords. 1-Go to your adgroup and hit the keywords tab. 2-Then click edit keywords and follow the following format: You should see this screen: Note the format that you can use to customize the CPC and the outbound link for each keyword: keyword**cpc**url+tracking id. There are two scenarios here. One is if you are direct linking and the other is if you are using a landing page. We will deal with each scenario separately. Direct Linking Example Here is what the URL in adwords will look like if you were direct linking to the merchant: Dog training**0.2**http://dog1.sitstay.hop.clickbank.net?tid=6
This is the format for a clickbank merchant. If you were using a CJ merchant the format would like this: Dog training**.4** http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2165835-10389812?sid=id 1-Add the proper URLs next to your keywords in google accordingly. Each keyword should be followed by a URL that has the unique tracking id that you created for it in your Excel sheet. It should look like this: 2- Click Saves changes 3- You re done. Now watch your sales come in Landing Page Example If you are using a landing page we will have to make a small modification to this system. Here is how it will work. You will send the tracking id to you landing page in the URL associated with your keyword. You will then use a programming language called PHP to take that tracking ID from the URL and insert it into your affiliate links in your landing page. This process is very simple and I ll break down step by step for you.
1- Rename your landing page with the.php extension. This is necessary to be able to write some php code inside of it. 2- In Adwords Edit Keywords and CPC screen, after each keyword add the URL for the landing page followed by?tid=id where id is the id that you assigned to your keyword in your Excel spreadsheet. It should look as follows: Dog training**.4** http://www.yourdomain.com/landingpage.php?tid=id 3- Open up your landing page and locate your affiliate links. 4- Insert the following php code where the tracking id needs to be: <?php echo $_REQUEST[ tid ];?> Let s take an example. In this landing page page, I have a review of the dog training product Sit Stay Fetch. I have three links to it that looks like the following: The first thing we do is we go into HTML/code view in dreamweaver or your favorite html editor, and locate that link. It should look something like this: <a href= http://affiliateid.sitstayfetch.hop.clickbank.net > Sit Stay Fetch Today! </a></p> Next do a global search and replace of the URL and replace: clickbankid.sitstayfetch.hop.clickbank.net
with the following: noorodeen2.sitstayfetch.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=<?php echo $_REQUEST[ tid];?> Or you can choose to replace each one manually. Notice: here we did two things. First we added /?tid= which is required by clickbank to specify a tracking id. Then we added the PHP code that will insert the id that was sent in the URL from your adwords campaign. Let s look at two more tracking examples a CJ example and an Aweber autoresponder example. Commission Junction Tracking Example: Say You were promoting a CJ product on your landing page. 1- The first thing is locate the link URL in HTML/code view. It should look something like that: <a href= http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2165835-10389812 >Click Here</a> to learn more about Dog Food Pro. 2- Insert?sid= followed by the php snippet of code from earlier. Here s what it will look like: <a href= http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2165835-10389812?sid=<?php echo $_REQUEST[ tid ];?> >Click Here</a> to learn more about Dog Food Pro. Aweber Tracking example: This form of tracking will enable you to find out which of your keywords result in opt-ins. This is very important as one keyword may get lots of clicks, produce no sales, but almost always results in opt-ins. This tells you exactly what your target is interested in. Why are they signing up? What are you offering them as a bonus? Here s how it s done. Locate your code for your Aweber form. It should look like the following:
What you are interested in is the section that has a few lines of code that start with the following: <input type= hidden name=.. Locate the following line in that section: <input type="hidden" name="aweber_adtracking" value=""> If that line doesn t exist, feel free to add it. It will not have any adverse effects. You want to put your tracking id in the value field. Do so by inserting out php code. The end result should like as follows: <input type="hidden" name="meta_adtracking" value="<?php echo $_REQUEST[ tid];?>"> That s all. You can also do this with getresponse and any other affiliate network that allows you to insert a tracking id. If you have any questions feel free to email me at support@xconversions.com.
Simplified Technical Explanation for The Technically Inclined You don t need to understand how this works to be able to use it. But if you re intereted, let me explain a little. Whenever you see the question mark symbol? in a URL it indicates that the URL contains values that the page you are visiting is using for one reason or another. In our case here we use the? to indicated that we are going to pass a value to clickbank, our landing page, or the merchant you re passing the tracking id to. What follows the? is the name of the variable that contains the value that we want to pass. You can think of a variable as a container of some sort that contains a value whether it is a number or an alphanumeric value. Now clickbank tells us that I know a variable called tid that I understand. If you want to pass any tracking identifiers, then put them in the tid container and I ll be sure to look into the tid container and record those values for you to see if they resulted in sales or not. Similarly, when we use a landing page, what we do in our adwords campaign by adding the?tid= is we are saying that we want to pass a value to our landing page. That value should be stored in a container called tid. Our landing page knows that there is a container called tid and it will extract that value and make something useful of it. That s exactly what our landing page does. It extracts the value using the php functions. $_REQUEST[ tid ] is the container that contains all the values that are passed to our page. We indicate that we re interested in the value of tid. echo is a php function that just means print. So our little snippet of php code means print the value contained in the tid variable that was passed to our landing page.
Following the same logic, if you were to have CJ links, instead of adding /?tid= you would add?sid. this is what CJ understands. The container they use, they name it sid not tid. I know this may seem a bit technical and a bit difficult. But if you follow the steps outlined here, you should be able to do it without a problem. If you have any difficulties please email your questions to support@xconversions.com.
Next Steps That just about wraps it up for the tracking. I know it may still be difficult and as such I am going to be releasing a video tutorial as well that will be available for sale. The video tutorial will walk you through the entire process shown here and a detailed example in video format. I have also released very exciting software that will save you tons of time with your tracking. The software, Xtreme Conversions will automate the entire tracking process for you and allow you to track on many different levels. It s going to be very exciting and it will change the face of Internet Marketing in 2008. I am in the process of creating a video showing you how easy it is to use Xtreme Conversions to do conversion tracking and expose any niche market. You ll be the first to have access to it. I would very much like to hear your feedback. You can feel free to email me with your comments or questions at support@xconversions.com