I have a video game rental review site (the one in my sig) which I run a ppc campaign. My question is, I only make money when people click through to the actual sites being reviewed. Is there a way in analytics that allows me to track how each of my keywords is converting to the other sites?
No. Google Analytics is only going to show data for your site. Most affiliate programs give you some kind of reporting. Try using different landing pages for each ad group/campaign (even if they are identical) & vary the SID (or other tracking label) of the link. BTW are you comfortable with Google having explicit statistics on your website?) There has been open speculation this may affect organic rankings.
What do you mean by explicit statistics and how can it affect organic google rankings? I certainly don't like that. Also, how can I avoid this.
Use opentracker it has exit link tracking meaning it will tell you how many visitors click on your outbound links Otherwise the other open is to place link tracking software on your page. This means someone clicks one of your outbound clicks, which then records the outbound in your analytics and then redirects them to the advertisers site
By explicit stats I mean that Google has access to all of the information used to generate the analytics stats, IP address, time on pages, etc. Basically everything you see calculated in analytics and anything that software can infer from that can be used as a factor in organic rankings. Google Analytics can affect organic rankings because Google uses (or could use) the data in their rankings. For example I've heard speculation that user time on page would affect the rankings. So if you have a page where users frequently don't stay long, it could trip a filter suggesting the page, or site, is spam. I don't know how the analytics data is used so just think of it as a privacy issue; it may provide sufficiently more value than risk to you. To avoid giving this to Google, just remove their code from your website. It is also worth noting that adsense code gives them some of the same information. YPN gives similar data to Yahoo! and MSN's ads do the same for MS.
Another option not mentioned is to direct the link to a page you create which contains your Adwords conversion script as well as the Analytics code, that redirects to the 3rd party site after a few seconds
But Analytics can track outbound clicks, isnt it? With the following event in the link code: <a onclick="javascriptageTracker._trackPageview ('/outbound/go/affiliate.php');" href="http://www.myweb.com/go/affiliate.php">Anchor Text</a> Then you have tracked in Analytics the destination website, am I wrong? PS: I use the "go" trick to cloak affiliate links.
I guess I have to eat my words. I hadn't thought there was such a feature in Analytics. If I actually used it, it would be great to know about the above feature.