I know tracking doesn’t sound “glamorous.” BUT:

If you don’t track, your campaign is almost DESTINED to fail

If you track, you can take a “so-so” campaign to super profitable!

I’ve had campaigns where my most profit came from the source I would LEAST expect. If you are not tracking your advertising and you start now, I can almost guarantee you are in for a few surprises .

Ok, some tips:

If you are an affiliate for someone else, by FAR the best method is this: Send the merchant an email and tell them to add your conversion code on their thank you page. That way, everything is getting tracked down to the individual keyword.

Some of the merchants will agree right away. Some may need some more “convincing.” You can always wait till you have made a couple of sales for them before contacting them. Trust me, once they see that you are actually making them money, the $$ signs will appear in their ayes and they will fall in love with you. They are almost guaranteed to put your code on their thank you page.

If you want to do everything “solo”, without emailing the merchant, you can still do this. You can add a tracking ID at the end of your advertising URL. For example, Clickbank has the variable “tid.” If you are promoting a dog training course and you are linking directly to the merchant, then you can track like this:

(You can click on the image to enlarge it).

Basically, you use a number to represent each one of your keywords. In another column, you have your affiliate link but without any variable for the tracking. To build your “tracking” link, you need to combine the “Keyword ID” and Straight Affiliate Link.

(To do this, click = within the “Affiliate Link With Tracking”, select f(x) which is the “formula” sign, select “Text”, select “Concatenate” and then use the arrows to populate the cell. First inser the straight affiliate link and then insert the keyword id. Then, click “Enter”).

Of course, by far the BEST way to go about tracking is to have a landing page. You have the much more control over it. For example, you can use the tracking code on your thank you page (if you are collecting optins).

This post doesn’t need to be long. Many know they should track but few do it. Then they complain that “PPC sucks.” :-)

STOP flying blind. START tracking. You’ll wonder how you ever did without it…