Let's assume you have your landing page setup with affiliate links and you have created ads on Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter. How do you track each search engine? And how do you track conversions? Potential problems as I see it: 1. Adwords cannot track conversions since the affiliate signup thank you page is on the merchants site and not your own. Therefore you can't place the javascript tracking code. Same applies for Yahoo and MSN. 2. The data can get very messy since you can be targetting the same keywords but from all 3 major PPC engines and with different match options on each keyword. How do you cope with this? Do you run a specific report you have setup in all 3 PPC engines and then download a csv file from CJ or whoever? And then you somehow manually match up the data by copy and paste? I see this as critical to being an effective affiliate marketer but it is currently a stumbling block for me. Looking forward to insight into this area. Thanks, Jon
We have different landing pages provided to put traffic on. On of the best way to do it is to have the same landing page inside different folders like /adwords/page.asp /overture/page.asp /msn/page.asp bt if you want to make it through the single page; it should have the traking code like ?se=tracking depending upon your requirnment and this can be included in the landing page provided to the search engine then they will mix their part of tracking code to it. So you wil be able to track the clicks effectively. These are the two best ways for tracking solution.
For me, I wouldn't want to have a possible duplicate content penalty by having differet folders for each search engine. I could create different content for each engine but I only want the one site to save time. Ideally, I would like to use some tracking system where I can rapidly view my stats for ROI purposes, maybe using Google Analytics or something like that. The last thing I want to do is spend ages compiling spreadsheets of stats and trying somehow to match up each sale with each keyword. I want to have a simpler, faster, more efficient (and consequently less accurate) method of tracking so that I can create large numbers of sites yet still have time to track. I would trade accuracy for speed of analysis, if you see what I mean. So, I figure if I know the average value of a visitor I send to a merchant, whenever someone clicks a link to leave my site, I can set a value as a sale. e.g. the each visitor to the merchant is worth $1. Then when someone clicks the link on my site to the merchant, $1 is triggered on the tracking script (say Google Analytics). Any solutions like this?
The merchant can handle the stats after the visitor leaves so you know how much a visitor is worth after they click through to the merchant site. All you need to do is set up google analytics so it tracks the clicks through to the merchant site by adding an onclick event to the link. You should then be able to see how many people click on the affiliate links and where they came from.
who said sooo... its free. man better check i feel you got the stats for google check out... because thats what they charge.
you can use the one page and track it as long as you have access to your log files. Eg landing page is page.php But for adsense, use page.php?1 and for msn use page.php?2 etc By adding a unique query-string to the end of each advertised URL you can monitor what is going on, lets you maintain a single landing page and should avoid any duplicate content problems.