When it comes to the art of Affiliate Marketing, many people are lost when they encounter what seems like a vast array of confusion. Our goal at the AffToolbox is to remove that illusion of confusion and focus on the key points to a successful affiliate marketing campaign for any product you throw up. A huge part of that success is tracking.

Tracking allows you to know which search engine brought you a sale, which keyword triggered the ad that led to the sale and which ad led to the click that gave you the sale. It's really that simple. Of course, additional information can be tacked on but for the purposes of this how-to, I'm going to show you how to track the following: search engine, specific ad and specific keyword.

Before we dive into examples, let's clarify our terms.

Tracking Code - Dynamic code that automatically attaches information to the tracking portion of a referral URL.

Referral URL - The website address given to you in order to track your personal referred sales (comes with a place to put tracking code)

Landing Page - The web page a user is directed to once they click on one of your ads/search results on a search engine.

Now that we have the terms out of the way, we can get down to business.

First off, in order for your tracking code to work, you're going to need access to PHP and your landing pages will have to be turned into PHP pages. The reason for this is that HTML pages can't process anything on their own; they're essentially just rich text documents. PHP was built to add dynamic functionality to HTML web pages, so you can change the extension of an HTML file to PHP and it will still function the same way until you add some PHP code to that page. That's when the magic starts to happen. But without turning your HTML page into PHP, none of this will be possible (at least, with this how-to it won't).

Secondly, you should become very familiar with tracking URLs (jump links, referral URLs, etc.). Think of tracking URLs like the middle man that keeps track of sales. When a customer clicks on your tracking URL, your affiliate information is passed both to the affiliate network site and to the product page itself all the way through to the sale. This way, all sales generated by you will be properly recorded. Most, if not all, affiliate networks will give you a tracking URL for promoting any product or service they offer and within those tracking URLs, they will give you space to track additional information (such as the information we're covering here today).

Let's use an AzoogleAds jump link as our example:

http://x.azjmp.com/124N3

Just so you know, I didn't come up with this URL. It was given to me when I browsed to the "Unique Christmas Trees from Treetopia.com" offer on AzoogleAds and copied the Tracking URL that was automatically generated for me. That specific tracking URL is for me only and will keep track of my sales only; no one else's.

Moving forward, the link alone will take the prospective customer to the landing page and track the sales but what it's missing is the vital information previously mentioned (search engine used, ad displayed and keyword). Now each network will do this differently, but the way AzoogleAds allows you to tack on tracking information is using the following method:

http://x.azjmp.com/124N3?sub=[TRACKING INFO]

Of course, you don't literally use '[TRACKING INFO]' but the search engine used, the ad clicked on and the keyword that got them there and it looks a lot like this:

http://x.azjmp.com/124N3?sub=GoogleChristmasTrees-3|xmas trees

You can instantly see how valuable the information is when it's passed back to you after a completed sale. Each sale on Azoogle will show you that Sub variable and for this hypothetical sale, you would know right away that the customer used Google and clicked on your 3rd ad for this particular offer using the keyword 'xmas trees'.

So you might be wondering how this would help your affiliate marketing business in general. Well, just think-- when you know which keywords and ads actually convert into sales, you know which ones don't and you can remove them altogether, thus leaving you only with those keywords and ads that make you money (profit, that is). The catch here is that you must be disciplined in your naming schemes for ads, no matter what the search engine. Each ad you create must have a different name that tells you what the ad group is and also which specific and unique ad is. On top of that, you must be careful to include the actual search engine in the ad name. The naming convention I go with is just like this:

[EngineName][AdGroup]-[AdNumber]

Or, as seen above, that might translate to:

YahooChristmasTrees-1 or
GoogleChristmasTrees-1 or
MSNChristmasTrees-1

...you get the picture. On top of that, you must stick to your naming conventions with the ad groups themselves. If you name an ad 'GoogleChristmasTrees-1', it had better go in the 'ChristmasTrees' adgroup on Google AdWords. The same goes for any other search engine you advertise on. This way, you can accurately track where sales are coming from.

Just to give another example of how this might work with another affiliate network, here is an example with a NeverblueAds jump link:

http://nbjmp.com/click/?s=16868&c=57501&subid=GoogleEharmony-3|manhattan singles

Notice specifically that the code varies from network to network; with AzoogleAd, it was 'sub' and with NeverblueAds it's 'subid' doing the tracking. When it comes to any of the other networks, it will most likely be different as well. Just be aware of that.

Another thing to boot, and this is key to the whole operation working smoothly, your destination URL must include two very important things: the name of the ad and the dynamically inserted keyword. I'll show you how this works on both AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. It shouldn't be too different using other networks, but make sure you do your research.

For AdWords, your destination URL should look something like this:

http://www.mylandingpage.com/landingpage.php?k=[AdName]&OVRAW={keyword}

For Yahoo, your destination URL should look something like this:

http://www.mylandingpage.com/landingpage.php?k=[AdName]

What this will do is actually pass those vital variables we discussed earlier to your dynamic landing page so that it knows where the customer is coming from. Now of course 'mylandingpage.com' would be the actual landing page of your domain and 'landingpage.php' could be your index.php or any other dynamic page you're using as your actual landing page.

Now on to the fun part: actually integrating this functionality dynamically. It's rather simple, really. In your landing page code (which is a .php file by now, as we previously discussed, so that it can process the following code), you would change your links to look something like this:

http://x.azjmp.com/124N3?sub=<?php echo $_GET['k'] . "|" . $_GET['OVRAW'];?>or

http://nbjmp.com/click/?s=16868&c=57501&subid=<?php echo $_GET['k'] . "|" . $_GET['OVRAW'];?>

Not too bad, right? That's essentially all it takes to set up proper tracking! You just need to make sure each link looks like those previous examples, aside from the actual ad networks they come from.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 2:56 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, AzoogleAds, Google AdWords, How-To, NeverblueAds, Yahoo Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.