Ever wondered which keywords in your Google Adwords campaign were making the most sales?

Do you know how to track your conversions? No? Then read this article!

In response to the “Q and A: Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing” article, Carol asked a VERY good question…

“How can you determine the conversions when you are promoting affiliate products where the actual sale occurs on someone else’s site? I’ve noticed that you can obtain code from Google to place on your “thank you for the order” page…. but is the sale occurs elsewhere, you obviously can’t do that. Once they have left your site to go to the vendor’s site, then you lose the ability to see what happens there.”

I’ll admit that conversion tracking for affiliate marketers who use PPC search engines to drive traffic is tough, but it IS possible.

In rare cases, a merchant will allow an affiliate (usually only Super Affiliates) to have the Google conversion tracking javascript installed on their thank-you page – where the sale is finalized.

But because most affiliates aren’t able to place code on the merchant’s thank you page, they have to do a little more work to find out which keywords are converting in their PPC campaigns.

Many networks allow affiliates to track sales by specifiying a variable in the affiliate URL. Commission Junction uses the SID parameter and Clickbank uses TID, short for ‘tracking ID.

Here is an example of an ecrypted CJ link with an SID that links to Single Parents Mingle.

http://www.dpbolvw.net/i7117p-85-7NPTVUWPTNPOTQWPSS?sid=138

To make the SID’s work for you, you need to first place Google Analytics on your landing pages and then assign unique tracking numbers or codes to each one of your keywords. This is simple enough to do if you build out your keyword lists using a spreadsheet. Here’s the SID/keyword portion of a sample spreadsheet:

136 single parent dating
137 single parents
138 single parents dating
139 single dads
140 single moms

Next, the Destination URL’s in your Google Adwords campaign must correspond to your SID’s and is most effective when you are direct linking from Google Adwords to the merchant. It can work however if you create multiple landing pages. Here is an example of a link that you might use to direct traffic to a Single Parents Mingle review page on a dating site.

http://101date.com/single-parents-mingle-site-review/?keyword=138

You’ll notice that 138 links to the keyword phrase ‘single parents dating’.

When each of your keywords has a tracking ID and a landing page with a corresponding affiliate URL, you’ll be able to see exactly which keywords are making the most sales when you run your commission reports.

Yes, it’s hugely tedious to link and match all your keywords, Destination URL’s and affiliate links this way, but it is worth your time and effort.

Want to save a HUGE whack of time on PPC conversion tracking?

SpeedPPC 3 is designed to help you produce accurate, EFFECTIVE campaigns with a solid ROI that include dynamically matching keywords to ad groups, matching keywords to similar keywords on dynamically created landing pages, great Google Quality Scores, and high converting campaigns.

Read my review | Go to Speed PPC

Build large, effective PPC campaigns incredibly fast

Updated / added July 23rd, 2010…

Since its release in 2008, the SpeedPPC campaign builder has developed into a very advanced piece of software. Most important for those who are just getting started with PPC, they have written an extensive guide that will allow you to understand the intricacies of the software and the different functionality that it possesses.

SpeedPPC is best PPC campaign building tool bar none that works with not only all the major PPC companies like Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Bing, but also all the 2nd tier ones.

I finally spent some time over the weekend playing with Speed PPC by Jay Stockwell, a qualified Adwords professional.

After about 2 hours of reading and hitting different combinations of radio buttons (and building a few campaigns (into which I’d put too many keywords and ad groups for the Google Adwords Editor to accept), I finally built a small 672-keyword U.S. state-related campaign using only 3 base keywords and the U.S. state expansion list. It took only seconds to generate the outputs and all were uploaded to Google Adwords via my Google Adwords Editor a few minutes later.

Other “Expansion lists” included with Speed PPC are US city names, Australian city names, Australian suburb names, UK town names, top 1000 movie names, top 1000 music artists, top 1000 actors, top 300 Xbox games, top 300 Xbox 360 games, top 300 PS2 games, top 300 PS3 games, cell phone model names, car model names, motorcycle model names, perfumes, cosmetics, digital camera model names, video camera model names, router model names, laptop model names, printer model names, and occupations.

Compared to how I used to build state-related campaigns using an Excel spreadsheet, Speed PPC was very swift both in terms of speed and ease. Better yet, the resulting search to ad display relevancy is MUCH much better.

For example, if someone searches for “New York Singles” not only will your ad title be “New York Singles”, but Jay also teaches you how to modify your landing pages to display the same phrase.

Although I did not try out the “Affiliate Datafeed Landing Page Generator” software that is included in the package, I imagine that for pure search affiliates who use huge product datafeeds and want to track the efficacy of their campaigns down to the model name, this piece would be very helpful indeed.

In summary, once the software has been mastered, Speed PPC is a worthwhile tool for experienced search marketers who want to quickly build BIG, highly relevant campaigns which result in higher quality scores and lower ad costs.

Although Speed PPC is pretty pricey at the posted price of $497, Jay has offered my readers a 20% discount ($397) and there is a 60-day money back guarantee.

Build large, effective PPC campaigns incredibly fast…

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool search marketer, or better yet, a content publisher who uses PPC marketing to drive traffic, I’d say give it a shot and set aside a morning to build some of those new campaigns you’ve been thinking about doing over the holidays. A well-versed pay per click advertiser should be able to recoup their Speed PPC investment in fairly short order.

This is exciting news for PPC marketers! Version 3 of SpeedPPC was launched yesterday. Version 1 was developed by qualified AdWords Professional Jay Stockwell and Allan Gardyne for use in their own PPC marketing. Version 2 was launched publicly last year – to very strong reviews, including my own. (Note that the review applies to Version 2, however.)

Since then, Jay paid close attention to the feedback that he received from hundreds of SpeedPPC users and produced a long list of fantastic new features which have made SpeedPPC 3 even better, even more useful for rolling out intelligently constructed, large, effective PPC campaigns incredibly fast.

SpeedPPC 3 is designed to help you produce accurate, EFFECTIVE campaigns with a solid ROI that include dynamically matching keywords to ad groups, matching keywords to similar keywords on dynamically created landing pages, great Google Quality Scores, and high converting campaigns.

You can create heaps of small, tightly focused ad groups. You can have just one keyword per ad group if you wish – in campaigns that are created at blistering speed. You can track every ad group and every keyword with surgical precision so you can quickly tweak your campaigns into profitability.

SpeedPPC Version 3 has support for:

• ABCSearch
• Affiliate Radar
• ASK
• Enhance
• GoClick
• LookSmart
• Miva
• Search123
• ValidClick
• MSN adCenter
• Yahoo! Search Marketing
• Google AdWords

Affiliates will be delighted to know that this includes affiliate and CPA offers that you couldn’t normally track easily and a bunch of really clever stuff that you can do with datafeeds.

Version 3 comes with 10 new training videos and 15 landing page templates. If you have problems, you can study the training videos and ask questions on the private forum.

Because the list of features and what you can do with SpeedPPC is far too long to list here, you should check out the SpeedPPC site.

If you’re still building your PPC campaigns the OLD way, you’ll find SpeedPPC is a seriously valuable tool. I highly recommend SpeedPPC for anyone who does PPC marketing.