I recently showed you how to track keywords with Adwords. This is very important when running pay per click campaigns because it allows you to continue bidding on the keywords that convert for you, and pause or delete the keywords that are just wasting your money. Tracking your keywords is probably the most effective way to boost your ROI.

The first step in tracking your keywords in Yahoo! Search Marketing is to enable URL tracking. Log in to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account and go to the “Administration” tab. The option to the very right will be “Tracking URLs.” Click it and turn Tracking URLs on.

Turning this on will now give you the parameters you need to track and optimize your keywords. When one of your ads is clicked, the url will have parameters attached to it, such as OVKEY, OVRAW, OVADID, as well as a couple others. The one I am most interested in is OVKEY. This lets me know which keyword I’m bidding on is sending the traffic.

So if I am running the ever-so-popular Vista Print offer through Incent-a-Click, the url they give me is http://incentaclick.com/nclick.php?id=xxxx&cid=3804. If I want to direct link to this offer, I will need to set up a redirect to it for the tracking. Create a .php file and place this text in the file and upload it to your website…

<?php header( 'Location: http://incentaclick.com/nclick.php?id=xxxx&cid=3804?='.$OVKEY ); ?>

Now all you have to do is put the url to that page into your ad url and you will be set.

If you will be using a landing page, you need to make sure you don’t lose the OVKEY parameter. To do this, every url on the page has to include the OVKEY parameter. To do this, you can make the url look like my-desired-page.php?OVKEY=<?php print $OVKEY; ?>

If you have any questions, send me an e-mail using my contact page.

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