Paid Search ROI

[hfactor]

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Hey all,
I'm sure this has been addressed before, but I want suggestions on the best way to track ROI with an affiliate marketing program?

How do I determine ROI from running PPC on Google vs. Overture? Is it possible to track leads from with PPC search engine?

Thanks in advance,

[ian]

hfactor,

You might need to tweak a few of the URLs as this post is a bit old, but its a good place to start http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/showthread...threadid=13388

Just use different tracking codes in adwords, overture et al.

Then its the simple task of producing url reports from adwords and overture, and matching the tracking codes with a transaction report from each of the networks. Simple!

[hfactor]

Hi Ian,
thanks for you quick response,

"Just use different tracking codes in adwords, overture et al."

The tracking code is set during the generation of the link, I then place this link on my web site. I create PPC to drive traffic to this page. Are you telling me that I need seperate links for each PPC seach engine? Seperate pages for each search engine?

Thanks,

[ian]

If you send ppc from various sources, you might want those ads to pass two parameters - the source and the keyword

i.e.

www.xyz.com/index.php?source=google&keyword=abc
http://www.xyz.com/index.php?source=...re&keyword=abc

index.php then grabs those paramters to form the tracking id of outbound url

i.e. tradedoubler.com/click.php?........&epi=".$source."-".$keyword.".........."
or LID= for buy.at
etc etc etc

Then take the output of the network's transacton or keyword reports and see the results for each source and keyword. Combine them in excel with your ppc costs et voila.

You could assign id numbers for all source / keyword combinations just in case merchants or networks take a peek, but it takes more work.

If you want to be that bit more clever, you could also grab the referring site url to analyse traffic from the ppc content or search partner network, and add it to the tracking id on your own page. i.e. LID=source-referrer-keyword

Haven't done that myself, but I'm guessing it would be simple enough.

[hfactor]

Hi Ian,
I wanted to thank you for taking the time to address my question..

We have many keywords, so implementing a tracking system that includes keywords would be very time consuming, granted this is what I was thinking about, but again the time involved is a concern.

Again thanks for your input.

Hfactor