Conversion Tracking: Key to Affiliate Success

When I first started doing googlecash, I was basically throwing up campaigns and adgroups and hoping I’d get a sale from somewhere, if I made a sale I had no idea what keyword or adgroup it came from. I call this “flying blind.”

Back in the old days of PPC marketing this was the standard for most affiliate marketers, you throw up a bunch of keywords and hope you’d get sales from somewhere. Often times you had to keep your keyword bids low across the board to make sure you would profit, since you had no idea where your sales were actually coming from.

Here’s what happens if you don’t track your results: you bid roughly the same amount on each adgroup/keyword, the profits you make on high converting keywords are eaten up by the non-converting keywords. Now if you have a campaign where the non-converting keywords are getting much more traffic then you’re high converting keywords, you’re dead in the water.

Now back in the early days of Adwords, where little competition existed, you could get away without tracking and still make 100% ROI. Good luck doing that in today’s hyper-competitive environment. If you don’t track EXACTLY where your sales are coming from then you’re as good as dead in this game.

The best way to track your results is to use Google conversion tracking, once you enable it all you need to do is have your merchant or affiliate manager put a little snippet of code on their thank you page. Once the tracking is enabled you’ll see the conversion show up in your Google account, letting you know exactly where your sales are coming from, down to the keyword.

Now I know some of you are thinking, “But Amit, I’m not a superstar affiliate like you, my merchant/affiliate manager won’t let me put my tracking code on their thank you page.”

Here’s a tip, affiliate managers that care about their affiliates and want them to succeed will put the conversion tracking code on their page for you. If they don’t, do you really want to work with that merchant/affiliate manager?

I’ll tell you one thing, I DON’T work with affiliate managers who won’t put conversion tracking code on their pages. The good news is that nowadays lot of affiliate managers have systems in place where affiliates can provide their Google conversions ID number and have their sales tracked.

If your affiliate manager or merchant is a jerk and won’t put 3 lines of code on their thank you page, then drop ‘em and find one that does.

Knowing your numbers in the affiliate marketing game so CRITICAL to success.

So are YOU flying blind?

A lot of people ask me how I can consistently achieve ROI of 100%-120%. “Amit, what’s your secret?” Stay tuned, I’ll talk about how to achieve this type of ROI in the next few post. In particular: how to analyze your conversion tracking and adjust your campaign accordingly, why you need to split test your landing pages and more…