Ad Tracking For Affiliates

So what exactly is involved when you perform ad tracking?

Basically what you will be doing is adding a tracking variable to the URLs that are used to ferry your prospect from the initial advertisement, all the way through to the final merchant Thank You page. In principle this sounds somewhat intimidating. Especially if you have little programming experience, or the desire to analyze the final commission reports made available by the affiliate networks which record the tracking variables you have used.

Fortunately, even though ad tracking is an involved process, the implementation can be largely hidden from you if you decide to acquire suitable tracking software to do the job. Well, most of the job, since not every aspect of ad tracking can be easily automated.

Typically the available ad tracking solutions work by attaching a tracking ID (usually an integer) to every unique keyword used to create the ad groups in your campaigns. This means that your ad groups have unique destination URLs for every one of the keywords that needs to be tracked.

Clearly, it would be a daunting process to create these unique URLs if you were forced to do it manually for thousands of keywords. But you don't need to. One of the very first things that you will do with an ad tracking solution is read in your existing campaigns (ad groups and keywords) and output them in a new format with rewritten destination URLs that now carry unique tracking variables. Thank goodness for software!

n alternative to adding tracking IDs to the destination URLs is to create them on the fly. This means that each time someone clicks on the destination URL in an ad, a tracking ID is created for that visitor and used as they follow the campaign path through to the merchant Thank You page. Part of the motivation for doing this is that in addition to being able to see which keywords and ads are responsible for sales, it is also possible to log information about the customer, like where they came from.

One ad tracking application that performs on the fly tracking is Jeremy Palmer's Optimize My Site. To read a full review of the software you can visit my Optimize My Site Review page.

Jeremy Palmer is a super affiliate who spends several hundred thousand dollars in pay per click advertising fees every year. It was precisely because he knew that he was wasting a great deal of his money by running campaigns that never resulted in any sales that he developed his software. He wanted to be able to see exactly which keywords and ads were bringing in the sales, and which were not. Since developing his software he has reduced his ad spend considerably and now makes more than a million dollars every year as an affiliate.

There are two primary scripts that Optimize My Site employs in the tracking of campaigns. One is tracking.php which receives the traffic from the clicked-on destination URLs that appear in the rewritten adverts. This script logs the click-through and generates a unique tracking ID that is floated as a cookie when the prospect hits your landing page. When they then click through to the merchant page the outgoing click is redirected to the other main Optimize My Site script, which is called click.php

It is the job of the second script to grab the tracking ID from the cookie, and attach it to the outgoing URL that is followed by the prospect as they head of to the merchant site to be pitched copy about the product they are interested in.

Later on, when the commission reports have been extracted from the affiliate networks, the tracking IDs are use to look up the data in the Optimize My Site database. This is then combined with the campaign cost reports that are provided by the pay per click service(s) that you are using. Incidentally, Optimize My Site can receive campaign cost reports from Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter. It can also process commission reports from all the major affiliates networks (currently it is configured to handle more than a dozen of these networks, including Commission Junction and ClickBank).

When you run reports in Optimize My Site you will be able to determine which keywords and ads are generating sales, and which are not. Generally you will have to allow campaigns to run sufficiently long before you can properly rule out the idea that a given keyword will ever make you sales for the niche and product that you are trying to promote. Sometimes a keyword will show potential, and it may just be that if you increase your keyword bid a little you can raise the position of your ad in the page, get more click-throughs, and enough new sales that the keyword then becomes profitable.

Luckily, Jeremy takes his software seriously, and there are about 9 reports that can be generated with it. These allow you to get a thorough understanding of how your campaigns are performing and suggest what you need to do to optimize them.

To read an in-depth analysis of the Optimize My Site software, I recommend you take ten minutes and read my Optimize My Site Review. If you are a serious affiliate thinking of getting into ad tracking, then this review supply just the information you have been looking for.