Tracking PPC effectiveness

[d33man]

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I recently restarted my PPC campaigns after some site improvements and sales seem to have picked up. However, as it is an affiliate site, I don't really know which keywords/ad-groups/campaigns are the most successful as I cannot tie this into a goal, such as clicking an affiliate link... or can I??

Ultimately I won't be able to tell which keyword drove a sale as that is beyond my tracking (to an extent) but can I at least track a keyword to a hit on an affiliate link?

many thanks, D

[Sandis]

Quick solution for monitoring CTR I guess there is this tracking202 that could help with that or you could develop little script of yours.

Ideally you would want mixture of PHP and Google Analytics + ability to pass unique details to the merchant, e.g. like dynamic keyword insertion or campaign inserting in tracking urls (few networks like MoreNiche do support this but not sure about your network).

Anyways, here's the code that will save the keyword into the $keys variable. Main condition is you have to use link cloaking as to read cookie it needs to refresh the page.

e.g. which could be something like site.com/go/?productid=12345 (which could be script that underneath uses the number as product ID and pulls your link from the database or inserts it straight away into the link if its same merchant

<?

// Do not change this code as these are special codes for reading Google Analytics data

$info = explode("|",$_COOKIE['__utmz']);
$ga_info = array();

foreach ($info as $val) {
    $temp = explode("=",$val);
    $ga_info[$temp[0]] = $temp[1];
}

$keys = (!isset($ga_info['utmctr'])) ? (isset($_GET['OVRAW'])) ? $_GET['OVRAW'] : "Uknown" : $ga_info['utmctr'];

// your affiliate link dynamically updating &keyword vairable with $keys value
// this of course is as an example and some merchants may allow dynamic campaigns etc 
$link = "http://www.merchant.com?affiliate=100000&product=12345&keyword={$keys}";
header ("Location: $link");
exit;

?>

So this is approximately how this works with passing keywords. Hope this give you some ideas to work around. Of course, with little tweaks you can do a lot more.

[d33man]

Thanks for this tip, I can see how it can be used quite efficiently with a number of affiliate networks that allow for custom URL params. My only issue is that as we publish new merhant links daily, we use direct links (http://affiliatenetworkurl.com/merchantid) as opposed to http://mysite.com/go/id as it is quicker to publish

In this instance, I wonder, having good knowledge of PHP but limited knowledge of the WP architecture, whether it is possible to programme a hook which can find the affiliate network URL, replacing a part of the URL using your code below with the search string/source? That would make it highly efficient and dynamic!

Thanks, D

Quick solution for monitoring CTR I guess there is this tracking202 that could help with that or you could develop little script of yours.

Ideally you would want mixture of PHP and Google Analytics + ability to pass unique details to the merchant, e.g. like dynamic keyword insertion or campaign inserting in tracking urls (few networks like MoreNiche do support this but not sure about your network).

Anyways, here's the code that will save the keyword into the $keys variable. Main condition is you have to use link cloaking as to read cookie it needs to refresh the page.

e.g. which could be something like site.com/go/?productid=12345 (which could be script that underneath uses the number as product ID and pulls your link from the database or inserts it straight away into the link if its same merchant

<?

// Do not change this code as these are special codes for reading Google Analytics data

$info = explode("|",$_COOKIE['__utmz']);
$ga_info = array();

foreach ($info as $val) {
    $temp = explode("=",$val);
    $ga_info[$temp[0]] = $temp[1];
}

$keys = (!isset($ga_info['utmctr'])) ? (isset($_GET['OVRAW'])) ? $_GET['OVRAW'] : "Uknown" : $ga_info['utmctr'];

// your affiliate link dynamically updating &keyword vairable with $keys value
// this of course is as an example and some merchants may allow dynamic campaigns etc 
$link = "http://www.merchant.com?affiliate=100000&product=12345&keyword={$keys}";
header ("Location: $link");
exit;

?>

So this is approximately how this works with passing keywords. Hope this give you some ideas to work around. Of course, with little tweaks you can do a lot more.

[d33man]

Sandis - had a thought about this...

Not a good idea to send keywords with links otherwise the merchant will get the inside track on your search strategy!