Increasing your profit margins is all about finding the keywords that are converting, exploiting them, and finding the keywords that are giving you tons of traffic, but not converting, and DELETING them. You can’t do this unless you know how to track your keywords.
Tracking keywords is different with each advertiser (Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN) and each network (Azoogle, Incent-a-Click, Never Blue Ads, etc.). In this post, I will show you how to track keywords in Adwords and how to place them into your offer urls.
Lets begin with the ad url on Adwords. Say you are promoting Incent-a-Click’s Vista Print offer and you are direct linking and have chosen to not use a landing page. All you have to do is paste the offer url into the ad and add {keyword} to the subid.
For instance… the offer url will look something like http://incentaclick.com/nclick.php?id=xxxx&cid=3804. Add &sub={keyword} to the end of it and you are done: http://incentaclick.com/nclick.php?id=xxxx&cid=3804&sub={keyword}
If you have chosen to use a landing page, you are going to have to do a little more work. First, I always use PHP so that is what I will be teaching here. Make sure your landing page is saved as a .php file. Now, enter your landing page url into the ad: http://www.thegreatestlandingpageintheworld.com/index.php. You now need to add a parameter to that url to hold your keyword. I like to use k (for keyword). Like the direct link, add the parameter to the landing page url in the ad: http://www.thegreatestlandingpageintheworld.com/index.php?k={keyword}. You are now done with Adwords and can go to your landing page.
Open the landing page up in an HTML editor (I like and use Dreamweaver). You will need to change every url on that page to ensure that the keyword tracking does not get lost. Add ?k=<? print $k; ?> to every url on the page (if your urls already have parameters you will need to put &k=<? print $k; ?> instead). Make sure you include the url to the offer, which will look like: http://incentaclick.com/nclick.php?id=xxxx&cid=3804&sub=<? print $k; ?>
And you are finished.
Now when you look at your reports, you will see which keywords are converting and which ones are not. Then go over to Adwords and delete the ones that aren’t converting. I actually suggest that you run some reports and import the lists into an Excel spreadsheet. More on that later…
Who knew affiliate marketing could be so simple?
Next time… tracking with Yahoo!
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