Hi, My approach to IM has largly been based on SEO to date but am thinking of trying my hand as some AdWords as well. It appears to me the big thing about getting an AdWords campaign right is tracking and testing. My question is: To use the conversion tracking in adwords, you need to insert javascript on your thankyou page. If your landing page is an affiliate review with affiliate links, this presents a problem. So if we can't do the adwords tracking on conversions, the next best thing is tracking readers clicks on the affiliate link. Is there any way to get the adwords conversion tracking to track a click on an affiliate link to an affiliate vendors page? Or is my assumption that you can't track conversions when the thankyou page is not on my site wrong? Thanks for any advice.
Instead of your link going directly to the vendor, it could go to a page in between that you create. The purpose of that page is to capture the click then automatically redirect to the vendor. Much the same way when you login here, you go to a Thank You page then automatically redirected to the page you were at when you logged in. Something similar to that but the final redirect going to the vendor. On my pages, I just log the clicks on links into a database rather than send the visitor to the vendor. I then compare those database results to my Adwords click results.
If you can send enough traffic, and ask your Affiliate Manager nicely, you might get them to place your conversion tracking code on one of their pages.
2 things you can do. Either ask your affiliate manager to install your conversion code on the merchants thank you page or use sub ids for tracking.
Thanks for the advice guys, I don't think I would start with the traffic figures to want to ask a merchant to install the code, and I don't think sub-ids could catch the particluar keyword searhed for on the conversion (I'm only guessing that the google code will track it down to that level). Certainly using sub ids to see which link and which landing page was clicked and converted would be good though. hmm, thanks again.
xtreme conversion would probably solve your tracking problem, it's one of the best tracking tool that many people are using... but there's also a no-cost version, which is tracking202 and prosper202... check them out.