AdWords & ClickBank Keyword Tracking — Testing, Tracking & Conversion from AdWords through to ClickBank
Before you skip over this chapter – don't!
If you want to succeed to have to do certain things. Testing and Tracking are two of them. Let's look at the sales process I set up…
- Visitor searches in Google or on the search network and finds my ad.
- Visitor clicks on my ad and goes to the landing page.
- Visitor is presented with the chance to opt-in to my list.
- I email my list regularly with my affiliate link in the email.
- People buy using my affiliate ID.
Tracking is about leakage. We want to see where our sales process is strong and where it is weak. We'll fix the weak parts and always try and improve the overall process.
Testing is where we do the improvement stuff. We'll test multiple ads, multiple landing pages, and multiple offers and see what responds better.
We can test and track our autoresponder emails and see which emails are the most successful and which are duds.
Doing all this means more money in my pocket. If you do this — you'll make more money. Period. Simple as that.
After many years without any form of analytics tools, ClickBank tracking was finally made available to the community and about freakin' time too!
I'm about to show you how I integrate ClickBank tracking, from AdWords, to my landing pages, to my autoresponder, and finally through to my ClickBank reporting.
Guess what?
NOBODY talks about how to do this!
Every "guru" says you have to test and track but until now nobody has connected all the pieces and shown someone how to track every step along the way. You're now part of an exclusive club. Cool, huh?
So hang on because this ride may get a little bumpy…
Step 1 — Get a ClickBank Affiliate Account
If you haven't got a ClickBank account yet — get one here. It's free. For the purpose of this case study I went and registered a new one: superguide
Step 2 — Get Your ClickBank Affiliate Link
Once you have a ClickBank account, head off to the ClickBank Marketplace and then find the product that you'll be promoting — as detailed in ClickBank product selection section.
Click on the create hoplink link, paste in your ClickBank NickName and enter 123 into the Tracking ID field.
You'll then get your affiliate link. Mine looks like this…
http://superguide.luke13.hop.clickbank.net?tid=123
Why enter 123 as your tracking ID?
It's simply so we can get our affiliate link with the ?tid= piece on the end. (As ClickBank will omit the tracking piece of code if you leave the tracking field blank.)
We're going to change the 123 part anyway. That's not important. What is important is that you have this part…
http://superguide.luke13.hop.clickbank.net?tid=
Of course — the superguide and the luke13 part will be different for your link.
Strategy Behind My Tracking Method — The Workflow
Err … it "looks" more complicated than it really is. Promise.
1. The first thing you need to do is create a list of unique tracking IDs. (There is a 8 character limit. Numbers and letters only.)
2009 UPDATE: The dudes over at ClickBank have since increased the TID limit to 24 characters long now. Enjoy!
Example…
123
456
789
001
002
003
004
005
abc
def
ghi
jkl
mno
a1
b2
c3
d4
e5
Anything will do. As long as it makes sense to you.
Understand?
2. You then to assign a unique tracker to each AdWords keyword group (Ad Group). For example, I'll name a group like this: WoW Buy Gold (123)
I than know that the ClickBank tracker 123 is assigned to this Ad Group (and only this keyword group).
There is no code to put in anywhere. This association needs to be manually tracked by you in a spreadsheet or a text pad. For example…
Trackers | Ad Groups
123 = WoW Buy Gold (123)
456 = WoW Buy Cheap Gold (456)
789 = WoW Guide (789)
Now here is where is gets really cool…
3. Each landing page has an opt-in form (Name Squeeze). I use AWeber. One of the lines in the form code is for tracking and looks something like this…
input type="hidden" name="aweber_adtracking" value="123"
We now put the assigned ClickBank tracking ID in the AWeber form code. (Within the value="" area.)
If you use a different autoresponder — like 1ShoppingCart or GetResponse — then you'll need to figure out how to do this same thing with their form code.
If you don't have an autoresponder — shame on you! I recommend AWEBER. It offers the best delivery rates and costs less than $20/month.
Because each keyword group has a unique tracking ID — and we have a separate landing page for each keyword group — each landing page gets it's own tracking ID.
Ding, Ding, Ding! …
We've just connected our ads to our ad groups to our keyword groups to our landing page to our opt-in form.
AWEBER — Tracking From Your Autoresponder Emails
In AWeber you can now call your tracking code from within an email follow-up message by using this special mail-merge code…
{!ad_tracking}
Example…
A subscriber opts onto my list from landing page #1. (With the tracker
123.)
Another subscriber opts into the same list from landing page #2. (With the tracker 456.)
I've already setup my follow-up message with my affiliate link to look like this…
http://superguide.luke13.hop.clickbank.net?tid={!ad_tracking}
… but AWeber will automatically mail-merge the ad_tracking ID associated with a particular subscriber — into the email that the subscriber will see.
So from the same subscriber list — subscriber from landing page #1 will see…
http://superguide.luke13.hop.clickbank.net?tid=123
… and subscriber from landing page #2 will see…
http://superguide.luke13.hop.clickbank.net?tid=456
Cool, eh?
ClickBank Reporting — Tying It Altogether!
You now simply generate a ClickBank report and look at the TID column…
If you see a sale associated with the tracker 456, for example, you then know that sale was generated from landing page #2.
Go back even further (into AdWords) and you can also see that the sale was a result of the WoW Buy Cheap Gold (456) keyword group (Ad Group).
This will help down the line to identify keyword groups that are costing moola but not generating revenue. (Or not enough revenue.)
This is powerful stuff for an affiliate!
Tracking Conclusion
You can track down to the individual keyword but that would, of course, require a separate landing page per keyword … which is an overkill. (It's very time consuming.)
If you keep your keyword groups small and focused, then there's no problem only tracking from a "keyword group" level.
Grey Hat Hijinks — Affiliate Link Cloaking
You'll also notice that the aforementioned example puts the raw ClickBank link right into the autoresponder message. I don't do it that way. I've just shown you this so that you can see the methodology behind what you need to do.
The problem is that some people will see a ClickBank hoplink URL and try and bypass your affiliate link. They'll actually type in the direct URL, cutting you out of the pie. Scoundrels!
There are a couple of solutions to this.
One choice is to encrypt the links using AWeber. AWeber will track all the links in your email messages and give you a report on which emails did people click on what links, etc. They do this by converting your link into some gobbley-gook looking link.
Something like this…
http://clicks.aweber.com/z/ct/?rU_TaW9kfOJH8W2AyUfigg
It works, but it isn't pretty. (As you can see above.)
Another option — a more stealthy and fun option — is what I do. I put the ClickBank links into a tracking program. (I use GoTryTHIS — and then use the exact same method as outline above to insert the ClickBank trackers into my links.)
So instead of this…
http://superguide.luke13.hop.clickbank.net?tid={!ad_tracking}
… I get GoTryTHIS to do this…
http://worldofwarcraft-secrets.com/{!ad_tracking}/goldsecrets
Simple, yes? ;-)
I can use GoTryTHIS to cloak my affiliate links — do split testing — and also to pre-load the affiliate cookie into my visitor. And as far as I know — no other tracking tool on the market can do all of this stuff.
And who doesn't like a cookie every now and again? *grin*
2009 UPDATE: Good news! Since December 2006 plethora of automated tracking tools have hit the market — and about bloody time!. They all essentially automate all of this crazy "manual" hooha stuff that is detailed above. I've used and tested most of them. But only one stands out as a clear winner for me — Affiliate Prophet Pro. AP makes it easy to automatically track sales back to the keyword level in AdWords. I use this tool every day. It's THAT good. It's that VALUABLE to me. More about Affiliate Prophet Pro HERE ».
Time for Email Marketing. Click to continue…
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