Ask AffiliateFuture - Tracking the ROI of Keywords

We thought it would be a nice idea to start posting some of the results of enquiries from both merchants and affiliates onto the blog in a new section called “Ask AffiliateFuture”.

Today we are going over an email from an affiliate asking about how to track their Paid search campaigns. Here is the email:

Dear AffiliateFuture,

I’ve been doing some PPC recently to promote some of your merchants and whilst I seem to be making more than I am spending I want to be able to track what campaigns and what keywords are working for me.

Can you please offer some advice on how to do this?

There are actually a number of ways to do this - the dedicated PPC companies have tended to build their own systems and use some proper re-directs to watch out for click fraud and then use our API’s to integrate the results (you can view the details of our API’s here).

But it doesn’t need to be that complex. With the help of dynamic keyword insertion via Google Adwords you can automatically track each and every keyword that you sent to AffiliateFuture without needing to change the tracking reference for each keyword.

Section 1 - Setting up Keyword insertion

Let’s take a look at one of our tracking links:

http://scripts.affiliatefuture.com/AFClick.asp?affiliateID=24343&merchantID=1975&programmeID=5334&mediaID=0&tracking=KEYWORD&url=

You will see I have bolded the word KEYWORD above - this is the bit that we need to change… This is where we use the keyword insertion (full details here)

Google states:

To use keyword insertion, insert the following code at any point in your ad text, including in the display URL or destination URL:
{keyword:default text}

So when setting up the ad you would use the following destination URL in the example above:

http://scripts.affiliatefuture.com/AFClick.asp?affiliateID=24343&merchantID=1975&programmeID=5334&mediaID=0&tracking={keyword:default text}&url=

Section 2 - Tracking the Keywords

Once you’ve completed the above you will be sending all your keywords across in each click that you send to AffiliateFuture so we’re half way there, next you will want to report back on this so that you can start the understand the true value of your keywords.

There are two main ways of doing this depending on what you want to achieve. Firstly there is a report within the AffiliateFuture interface called the Tracking Reference Summary.

Tracking Reference Summary

As you can see from the screenshot above, this report lets you select the merchant and the date range and shows you the keyword used (In this case Test, Test Keyword and Test Keyword 222), the date, the number of clicks, number of leads / sales and the commission values. It’s a useful report to give you a snapshot of the data however you’ll quickly see that if you running a number of campaigns it’s really only useful for a snapshot.

The second option is to export a report in CSV/Excel format. The report that you will want is the “Detailed Transaction Report” which will show you all sales/leads for the given time period - it includes the commission values and the tracking references so by exporting this data you will be able to analyse it to your hearts content.

And that’s about it - hopefully it’ll give you a good overview of the best way in tracking keywords and ultimately lead to a higher return on your investment.

If you’d like to ask AffiliateFuture a question for the blog then please email us at the usual address - enquiries@affiliatefuture.co.uk

Cheers
James Little
Head of Affiliate Development

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