Adwords Remote Conversion Tracking
An Interesting read.
http://www.jimkarter.com/2007-12-13-adwords-remote-conversion-tracking.html
Do you use Adwords to make money online from CPA based affiliate networks like like Commission Junction or ClickBank, AffiliateFuel etc.? If yes, then you need remove conversion tracking (a new time I just thought) to optimize your campaigns. So what is this remove conversion tracking? Read on…
Do you optimize your campaigns? How do you do that? Do you keep high CTR keywords and delete low CTR keywords? If you are doing this you may be doing one of the biggest mistakes in the PPC world. Remember that high CTR does not mean more money to you, it just means more money to Google. There is a very high probability that high CTR keyword is one of the biggest money drainer for your campaign. How do you find it out and correct it? For that you need to do remote conversion tracking of campaigns.
What is Remote Conversion Tracking
In simple example, it will tell you what keywords from your Adwords campaign made that sale in your Commission Junction account. Not just Commission Junction, but it can be used with any of the CPA or sale based affiliate programs.
If you are running an in-house affiliate program or selling something in-house, it is easier to track the conversion. But how to do that for advertising networks like Commission Junction, ClickBank and AffiliateFuel? This is where this remove conversion tracking is required.
In simple terms this is what you need to do if you have a landing page. I will just explain each of them in detail.
- Pass the keyword for which the person clicked on your ad, to your page through a query string variable in your Adwords’ URL.
- Get that variable on the page and append it into the SID or TID of advertising network’s referral link.
- Check your account on advertising network to see the keywords which actually converted.
- Now optimize your campaign based on these results, and not just CTR results
So, this is actually the process of passing the query the user made at Google search engine, to the page, and from there to the advertising network.
This is how it is to be done. Let say, in your Adwords campaign your destination URL is set to:
http://www.yoursite.com/landingpage.php
And, this is the page where you are selling some product from Commission Junction. You need to use a feature of Adwords called “dynamic keyword insertion” to change your destination URL to:
http://www.yoursite.com/landingpage.php?q={keyword}
Lets say the search engine user searches for “hot widgets” in the search engine and click on your page, the url with become
http://www.yoursite.com/landingpage.php?q=hot%20widgets
Now the next task is to put this keyword into your affiliate link ( Here lets say Commission Junction link ). You can use following php script to do so.
<?php
$keyword = $_GET[’q’];
if(!strcmp($keyword, “”))
{
echo ‘<a href=”http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2412142-10482525?sid=Default”>Anchor</a>’;
} else {
echo ‘<a href=”http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2412142-10482525?sid=’ . $keyword . ‘>Anchor</a>’;
}
?>
In Commission Junction, you can use “sid” in the url to track it. Similaryly in ClickBank you can use “tid” to track it.
<?php
$keyword = $_GET[’q’];
if(!strcmp($keyword, “”))
{
echo ‘<a href=”http://jimkarter.reseller.hop.clickbank.net/tid=Default”>ClickBank</a>’;
} else {
echo ‘<a href=”http://jimkarter.reseller.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=’ . $keyword . ‘>ClickBank</a>’;
}
?>
Are you using wordpress and worried about how to put that php code in the post or the page? No problem. There is a solution to it as well. You can use a wordpress plugin called phpexec. After installing the plugin just embed the above code into into <phpcode> and </phpcode>. For Example:
<phpcode>
<?php
$keyword = $_GET[’q’];
if(!strcmp($keyword, “”))
{
echo ‘<a href=”http://jimkarter.reseller.hop.clickbank.net/tid=Default”>ClickBank</a>’;
} else {
echo ‘<a href=”http://jimkarter.reseller.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=’ . $keyword . ‘>ClickBank</a>’;
}
?>
</phpcode>
Now you can just see which keywords in your Adwords campaigns are doing wonders for you and which are not. So optimize your campaigns based on these results and make some more money online.
Adwords remote conversion marketing tips PPC
