PPC Marketing: Tracking your keywords for Ultimate Profit
Posted by webmaster, under Affiliate Marketing, Conversion Tracking, PPC MarketingI’m going to talk about 2 easy ways you can track your keywords with Google Adwords and Yahoo’s YSM.
When I first started PPC marketing, I didn’t understand the power of tracking keywords, which is why I never got any campaigns off the ground. Tracking your keywords is a must or else you might as well just stop your campaign. Because ultimately without any keyword conversions data, you will not know what keywords are profitable and which ones are not. You need to weed out the ones that are costing you money and expand on the ones that are making you profit. It’s that simple.
Tracking Your Keywords for Ultimate Profits
Now, let’s talk about how to track your keywords. There are two ways:
Method 1: Placing your pixel code on conversion page - The simple and efficient way
Placing your Google or Yahoo tracking pixel code requires you to contact your affiliate manager or the advertiser asking them to place the code on the conversion page of the offer.
Where to get the pixel code:
Adwords: Login-> Campaign Summary -> Conversion Tracking -> Create New Action -> pick Lead or Purchase from drop down, name your action, enter the commission amount on the offer -> click Save Action and Get Code .
Once the code is placed on the conversion page of the offer, you will start seeing conversion data beside your keywords in Adwords. Now you will know what keywords are converting and which ones are eating up money.
Pros: I like this method better since its easier to setup and involves almost no work on my part. The conversion data you get back is accurate and easy to track.
Cons: It requires to have your AM your place your code on the offer page. If you work with networks like clickbank, you are required contact advertiser directly and not all advertisers will do that for you.
Method 2: Capturing search keywords using PHP code and subids - The Coding way
You can write simple PHP code to capture the exact search keywords people typed when they clicked on your ads.
The idea is to put the code in your landing pages, capture the search keyword and append the keyword as a subid to your affiliate URL.
Now let me show you the code and see how we set this up with both Adwords and YSM.
Tracking keywords using PHP code with Google Adwords:
1. In the destination URL of your ad copies, append the following text in red
http://www.your-landing-page-domain.come/?kw={keywords}
You’re telling Google to get the keyword user types and append that at the end like this…
http://www.your-landing-page-domain.come/?kw=blue+widgets
2. Now, we just use the follwing PHP code in our landing page to capture this keywords and append it as subid to out affiliate URL.
<?php
$kw = $_GET["kw"]; //get the search keyword user typed
?>
<html>
<body>
<a href=’<?php echo “http://your-affiliate-url?sub=$kw”?>’ >Get Free Widgets Here</a>
</body>
</html>
Tracking keywords using PHP code with YSM:
YSM is bit different from Adwords. You don’t need to modify you ad destination URL like in Adwords. Yahoo will append the search keywords to your landing page URL itself as long as your have Tracking URLs on.
Turn on Tracking URLs in YSM:
YSM: Log into your YSM account -> Administration -> Tracking URLs -> Select Tracking URLs on -> Click Save Changes.
Yahoo now will append ?OVRAW=<search+keyword> query string to your landing page url containing the search keywords user typed when they clicked you ad. You can learn more about it here on Yahoo help pages
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/sps/screenref/16897.html
The PHP code for tracking keywords with Yahoo:
<?php
$kw = $_GET["OVRAW"]; //get the search keyword user typed
?>
<html>
<body>
<a href=’<?php echo “http://your-affiliate-url?sub=$kw”?>’ >Get Free Widgets Here</a>
</body>
</html>
Pros: With this method you don’t need to run around after your AM or the advertiser to place your pixel code. You can basically track keywords on your end in your advertising network account. Your keywords will showup as subids. For example in your Azoogle affiliate account, you can pull up the sub id report to see the keywords.
Cons: Requires basic understanding of PHP coding on your part.
Hi there NAM,
What if I’m doing a review page with 3 products? How do I put 3 separate url.
And if it’s Clickbank then it become
echo “http://your-affiliate-url?tid=$kw”?>’ right?
You really don’t have to do anything even if you have three different affiliate URLs. Just append the keyword as subid the same way for all URLs.
Yes, for clickbank you would use ?tid=$kw. But you have to remember, clickbank only allows maximum of 8 characters to be appended to tid.
In most cases your keywords will be greater than 8 characters. To get around this, you need to assign acronyms to each of your keywords in adwords and use that as tid.
So, the destination URL to say your keyword “blue widgets” would be, yourdomain.com?tid=BW.. So when ever you see BW in your clickbank stats you know it was the keyword “blue widgets”.
Hope that helps.
Hi, I’m doing this just a bit differently and I have a question…is there a place where all the possible tags are listed? For example, you say to use ?kw={keywords} so clearly the variable “keywords” is used by google when a user types a word? I’ve also seen bid_keyword used…is there a list of all of these somewhere?
No, i couldn’t find any help pages on google adwords site about this. I picked this up from talking to people on the forums. I knew there had to be way in Google to capture keywords since Yahoo has whats called tracking URLs where you can capture search keywords and bid keywords using OBRAW and OVKEY parameters in the URL.
First off, thanks for the basic help with this… seems like information like this isn’t easily found online. I saw your original thread about 250/500 a day on DP.
Anyhow, I am in the same position you were in. Couple bucks a day, nothing seems to go right… but now it is time to start right.
My question is, when you track via Adwords Pixel, and you are searching a broad term, does it show each specific term for that broad keyword? If not, do you track these somehow?
Thanks
Joshua,
No you won’t see the exact term for that broad term the user typed in Google for which you got a lead for. In adwords, you will see the number of leads beside your broad keyword.
Say you have a broad keyword buy computers and the user typed buy gaming computers and you made a sale, you will see lead/conversion beside keyword buy computers but you will not know what user originally typed. I know there is way to combine google analytics with adwords campaign to track these sort fo things. I haven’t tried and no I don’t track specific keywords. I just track whetever I see in my google adwords account and I think that should be enough.
The rule of thumb is as long as the keywords is profitable, I leave it and don’t worry about it. If a keyword is costing me money, I just delete it or if I think i can split it further into more keywords, i do that instead.
Thanks for the quick reply! I guess you sit on the computer as much as me!
I wish I could get a mentor, like what GTAce was doing. I always question everything I do, and then question it over and over, and in the end, its hard to pull the trigger.
I have the offer, website, landing page, but now going through the keywords, and after reading that Amit keyword post, I don’t know if I am even doing to keywords too little, too much, or what. Seeing as your comment box does not scroll down, I cant see what I am typing but… I just wish there was a definite guide to PPC out there. Then it would be too easy for everyone, right? haha.
Yea, the comment box has bug. I’ll fix that soon.
No there is not definite guide to PPC because every niche, offer, keywords differ from each other. The only guide you will have is own way of doing things but as your discovering your own recipe for this just keep plugging at it, keep reading forums, blogs, keep asking questions and keep working. Don’t sit there and think too much or dwell. You need to do it if like to learn anything.
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