I’m rather new to clickbank and affiliate marketing with adwords in general, and therefore I have some questions. I have made 2 sales with clickbank so far. My first sale was pretty much luck, and the second was more of a calculated sale. OK, my fellow forum pals, my goal is being able to live of sales from clickbank (not a big surprise I guess, who wouldn’t want that right). I have begun learning about PPC and clickbank for some time now, and now I finally feel that I know a whole lot about it. There are still some things I need to figure out, and some questions I still haven’t figured out yet. I hope you all will help me to answer these questions as nicely as possible: 1. I hear everyone taking about the importance of tracking which keywords that converts. How do I do this exactly (when sending traffic with adwords) ? I mean how do I know for sure what keyword made the sale? When I link directly to the affiliate site, and when I link to my own landing page in adwords? 2. First landing page I made didn’t include an opt-in option, what is the best autoresponder I should work with? I know many use aweber. Are there any alternatives out there, any free ones? 3. One product I promoted (the one I made my second sale with) through adwords, converted in like 1:50 approx. Since then no more sales, and now I have like 120 “hops†in clickbank. Should a product like that be dropped? How can I track keywords for this product (when I link directly to affiliate site). 4. I see some landing pages only have like an opt-in box, and almost nothing else. Is it possible to use such landing pages in adwords? Wouldn’t pages like that get a horrible quality score? Is it better to have a pre-sell landing page and an option for opt-ins? 5. Here is an important question: If I start a campaign and send traffic to my own landing page. Do I make a copy of that landing page with little variations in text to each and ever adgroup I have in adwords? Like if I have. www.example.com, then I should make a subdomain for every adgroup right!? So that adgroup 2 will send traffic to www.example.com/adgroup2keywords.html ? That wont be very SEO friendly anyway…? But I guess the adwords QS will be good this way. 6. I have a google analytics account, should I use this with adwords to help me track my traffic to landing pages? That’s all for now I think... Really appreciate all answers! Thanks.
1. Read about Adwords Conversions Tracking http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6331 You can also use Clickbank tracking. More about that here http://www.clickbank.com/affiliate_tools.html#Affiliate_Tools_5 Your destination URL can be your hoplink, which is called direct linking or you can use landing page. Using your own landing page will allow you to have higher QS. 2. www.aweber.com is the best, don't bother with others. 3. If product doesn't convert, that might be your keywords problem as well. Don't just throw away product, without properly trying them. Optimize your campaigns for best results. 4. "Is it better to have a pre-sell landing page and an option for opt-ins?" That's perfect. 5. Adwords allows you to create subdirectories that don't exist. Like www.example.com/blabla. So you can use this advantage to mention your keyword in display url. Group your keyword variations in tight groups. This way you will able to write better ads and get higher CTR. 6. Google Analytics is a good tool to track your results. You should use it sometimes.
Here are some answers to your questions. 1) Some publishers provide you with a special id that you can add to the hoplink which dynamically adds you code to the thank you page, If you don't have a lot of kw then you can add a different cid number to every keyword If you conduct many sales for a publisher then you can try and approach them and ask them to add your code to their thank you page 2) aweber.com is the best you can also try www.getresponse.com they have a free and paid version. The free version has adds in them. 3) You should wait for about 300 hops to get a better picture of what is going on 4) You should have rich content together with an opt in for you landing page 5) If you create many landing pages for different ad groups and the only way you are getting traffic to those pages is via PPC, then don't worry about SEO since you are not trying to rank for it anyway. If however you are looking to rank for those pages then you can create the multiple landing pages and block the search engines from crawling those pages via robots.txt file and only allow the search engine to crawl one page. This way you have the better of the 2 worlds. 6) For sure its free and good. You should also try statcounter.com which is also free its always good to have a variety of analytics for your sites, this will help you track your sites better, this is because each service provides you with different stats. Another good one is haveamint.com which costs but is only a one time fee of $40. Good Luck