I am sending google adwords traffic to my affiliate review website and from there to clickbank merchants. I know my advertising is profitable because I tested it in the beginning without any other traffic to the domain and I could see my sales were greater than my expenses. But is there a way for an affiliate like myself to track which keywords and ads convert to sales, short of placing the adwords conversion tracking code on the merchant's site? I was thinking of setting up a new domain, exactly like the one I have, which I'd ONLY use to test campaigns so I know precisely how much I've spent vs. my returns. Is there any other way to do it that I should know about? Thanks.
Yes, but you need a script to do it for you.. I use one that appends the keyword phrase searched on in Google into the affiliate link where I need it to to track the sale.. that's then carried over into the reports. Otherwise you'd have to have conversion code from Google or a program like Adtrackz in order to track conversions. HTH -Matt Levenhagen
alot of places like maxbounty, etc. let you havevariables that the vars are added to a report in your account. like add &s1=google will put "google" in the stats, showing the affiliate, if you have a site with a member base, its like http://www.affiliateurl.com/landingpage.php?id=4r35334563&s1=$user and it will log it like aff 7 comp. by = takita787 aff 3 comp. by = username
Are you advertising Clickbank sites? If yes, then you can simply ask your vendor to put your conversion tracking code into their thank you page.
Sorry, I had missed these replies. I had a look at adtrackz.com and it allows you to create dynamic tracking urls, like mlevenhagen said. But is there a solution that "saves" (by means of a cookie or something) the tracking URLs to the user, so if they return to your website later and click on an affiliate link again, they will still be tracked with the appropriate tracking ID? I don't know if adtrackz can do that.