PPC Marketing: Tracking your keywords for Ultimate Profit
I’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.
