Am in the process of trying to dig down deeper into which keywords are getting sales for an affiliate site of ours and it's proving to be a fiddly job.
Anyone know of software (free or paid) they'd recommend where you can track keywords from Google to see which are resulting in clickthroughs to merchants?
Cheers,
Ed
getclicky.com
Can also use Google Analytics in number of ways
Two methods i know of
Have all clickouts go via redirect page and call an event/conversion trigger on that page
or
Place the on click trigger/event on all the outbound urls
So trigger would look something like this
pageTracker._trackEvent('spam','amazon','logo')
So in stats you will see all the keywords that result in amazon logo clickouts
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html
Thanks Drastic - had a sift through GetClicky, but it didn't seem to add much to what can already be found on Analytics. Maybe I'm missing something.
Paul - took me a while to get my head around all the tracker stuff, but with the help of a techie and some extra Javascript have managed to hack something together that works. Really appreciate you posting that info!
Cheers,
Ed
My understanding is you can track full sessions from referral to exit. I haven't used it yet myself.
We have rolled our own as we're kind of paranoid with that, but using the affiliate networks subid function works well.
QuoteWe have rolled our own as we're kind of paranoid with that, but using the affiliate networks subid function works well.
Having owned a network and worked on the backend of many others, in theory subid's should work really well. Most merchants and networks have no idea about passing anything back, or they do something like restrict it to one variable and 64 characters, which is crazy.
Also, a lot of affiliates seem to think by sharing their data with the network is a bad thing. Well I always knew far more about what worked on the offers than they did, mainly through internal efforts prior to launch, so they hide, they can't get helped. In days gone by helping people with negative words, exact matches has saved them a ton of experimental cash working stuff out themselves.
Having been analysis keywords that convert I am always stunned at why/how some do, but they do. Indeed my house in Cyprus was built on the back of one very such word over a period of 18 months, it was new, it scared people, they searched for it, they found me, they clicked, they bought, bingo.
Edo, are you talking about direct PPC traffic to the merchants? If so, I might be able to help you. I've built a log churning tool that is compatible with CJ, SAS, and LS affiliate networks and both the Adwords an and adCenter logs.
Basically it looks at the spend vs the earn on each keyword and match type. I've been using the tool along with some other tools for over a year but I'm looking for some Alpha testers before I make a commercial product.
Hey Littleman,
Was talking about organic search. The aim being once I know which keywords are resulting in users clicking through to merchants from our affiliate site I can aim my SEO efforts at those keywords.
Have had a dabble in PPC but some of the terms I'm after are £2.80 a click so can't go after them as it often takes 50+ clicks to our site to make a sale through the merchant, meaning I'd need to make £140 commission from that one sale just to cover the cost of the Adwords campaign. That kind of commission only happens once in a blue moon and often the commision from a sale is around the £10-£20.
PPC is certainly something I'm interesting in exploring though as if there are arbitrage opportunites out there I'll chase them down like a dog on heat. I do deal with CJ and LS, but the network I use pretty much solely these days is Affiliate Window as they house nearly all the big UK jewellery merchants which is the sector I'm involved in.
Cheers,
Ed
PS Jim - a house paid by a keyword. Nice work, sir.
QuotePS Jim - a house paid by a keyword. Nice work, sir.
I would say EVERY vertical market has one of those words, it used to be awesome when every month Yahoo gave us (as one of their Accredited Agencies) a list of unbidded terms, in other words, phrases that there was demand but no supply. I sobbed the day it stopped, and I blubbed like a baby the day they retired the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool, that was the best tool there ever was.
I always used to love going into the Overture UK office to find out what was better than sex each month.
The eye-opener for me was 30 million people a month went to Yahoo and typed in Google as their search phrase. At that point I knew there were at least 30 million idiots using the internet on a day to day basis.
Nice. Question is how do you find that special keyword without having to sell your granny to fund zillions of Adwords experiments?
>how do you find that special keyword
By asking an unethical aff manager ;-) Haven't been able to though (luckily as they would probably tell other affs what works for us ;)
..and that's why we cloak the subid into a string of numbers we then look up in our own db.
>..and that's why we cloak the subid into a string of numbers we then look up in our own db.
Yeah, same here, and I also use a js redirect that suppresses referer data.