OK, so you have a campaign that’s making money, but you wish you could find out how much money you are throwing down the drain on non-converting keywords!
You need to know which keywords produce conversions. With Commission Junction, there is a field known as a SID, which stands for Shopper ID, that is available on your affiliate links. It allows you to tag each keyword with any arbitrary string of up to 64 characters in length. Let’s look at a typical affiliate link:
http://www.dpbolvw.net/click-1234567-12345678 (not a real link)
There is a “Show Advanced Options” link available in the Get HTML window that allows you to get links. If you drop that down, you can elect to specify a SID. Enter KeyWord into this field and click Update HTML. The link becomes something like this:
http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-1793052-10368053?sid=KeyWord
Now, if you wrap KeyWord in curly brackets, you get this:
http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-1793052-10368053?sid={KeyWord}
If you use this URL in place of the original in Google AdWords, the keyword will be listed in the SID for any sales that you have made!
You can also track the performance of your ads, by inserting something just before or after {KeyWord}. Say for example you have three ads working in rotation, and you want to find out if there is a specific ad that converts better than the others. Simple! Just change {KeyWords} into Ad1+{KeyWords}, Ad2+{KeyWords} and Ad3+{KeyWords} in the listed URL for each ad respectively. You just need to keep a record of which ad is Ad1, which is Ad2 and which is Ad3.
As time goes on, you can optimise your campaign by throwing out or reducing the price of keywords that don’t convert; keeping the keywords that do work; throwing out ads that don’t work and keeping ads that do work.
Watch this space for a new tool that will allow you to track ClickBank campaigns more effectively. ClickBank do not have a tracking system like that of Commission Junction, but a product will soon come onto the market that will help you to track ClickBank sales.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
