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Keyword Conversion Tracking

You need to track your AdWords campaigns very carefully. If you're doing things right (such as not bidding crazy amounts of hyper-competitive keywords), you don't need to fear losing your shirt. But you do need to figure out which campaigns work best.

The first step is to track your overall campaign conversion rate. If you're promoting an affiliate product, this is simple to do.

Look in your AdWords account to see the total number of clicks you're getting per day, and the total cost of those clicks. Then check your affiliate statistics (each product seller's affiliate manager should give you a way to do this) to see how many sales you got. Divide the number of sales by the number of clicks and that percentage is your campaign conversion rate.

But you need to take this a step further to determine how each keyword performs. That'll let you get rid of poor performers and boost your profits.

You can't really use Google to do all of this, because their keyword-level tracking feature requires you to put some code on an product's thank you page. Most affiliates won't let you do that. So you have to use a different strategy that combines Google data and affiliate statistics.

Most affiliate managers (ClickBank, for example) will let you include a tracking code or sub ID at the end of your affiliate link. It looks something like this for ClickBank:

http://yourcbnickname.publisherid.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=trackingid

Now for the magic. Assign each keyword a unique tracking ID, and update your URLs accordingly. Now your affiliate statistics will tell you which ID produced each sale.

At this point, you can go into your AdWords account and get data for total clicks, total cost, and click-through rate for each keyword. Then you can add your affiliate statistics to complete the conversion picture.

It's not hard, but it takes a little elbow grease. The good news is that once you know which keywords perform best, you'll be able to boost your profits by leaps and bounds.