Lately I've been getting a lot of questions revolving around keyword tracking. Apparently, people still don't think it's very important to track which keywords convert into sales. Apparently, the mindset is that as long as you're in profit, that's all that matters.

WRONG.

If you aren't taking advantage of tracking individual keywords, you're losing money, period.

How do I know this? Well, I've done it both ways -- with and without keyword tracking and I must say, the method speaks for itself. If you don't do it automagically with a service like Tracking202 or the like, you can always do it manually until it gets out of hand. I've created an example of just how that might look for you if you were to run a campaign on potato chips-

As you can see, the campaign is in profit overall at $140.50 net. But what you might notice are the numberes in red (negatives). These are the keywords we should pay special attention to after a period of about a week. You'll also notice the profit margin - 15.45%. Some companies run smoothly on less but their volume is exponentially larger. For smaller volume you'll want to increase your profit margin, unless you plan on creating tons of similar campaigns (not realistic).

So what can one do to increase profit margin? Well, just take a look at this updated chart-

Notice, I've gotten rid of the "Google - chips" and "Yahoo - chips" keywords. Right away, you see the net profit has jumped up to $390.90. The profit margin has jumped way up to 137.59% and my total spent has gone all the way down to $284.10. Wow! I've more than doubled the amount of money I get to keep just by removing two keywords from the mix.

Now of course I don't expect you to completely ditch the higher-volume keywords. In fact, I expect you to work harder to get those into the green to increase your overall profit. But I wanted to drive home a point: Without tracking your individual keywords, you are losing money. Without fail, there are always going to be keywords that outperform others and there will always be keywords that drag your bottom line down.

You might imagine that when you get into the big dog arena (dealing with multiple thousands of dollars daily) this becomes immensely more important. You'd be right. For now, master the art of tracking your keywords and bidding accordingly and you'll get there.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Strategy, Keyword Trimming. 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.