Affiliate Musketeer

I had a problem. I was pretty good at using AdWords and fairly new to promoting products via CJ. I knew that to understand my traffic and find out which PPC keyword terms turned into sales, I had to have some way of measuring them and here’s how I finally solved the problem…

Like everyone else looking for the solution to this problem, I googled it. I eventually found my way to a popular software program that you’ve probably heard of already called Xtreme Conversions. This was the first method I tried to successfully monitor my conversions.

This software basically generates a piece of code that you paste into your affiliate landing page which then records all the keywords users searched for. The trick with this software though is that it automatically appends either a TID (for clickbank products) or SID (for CJ products) to the click through. How this works is it gets the keyword from the AdWords ad, passes it through its software, records the keyword and assigns it a numerical ID. This numerical ID becomes your TIDs and your SIDs. When you make a sale via CJ, the SID numerical value will be assigned to the sale and will show up in your CJ sales reports. To find out which keyword generated that SID, log into your Xtreme Conversions page and it will show you a list of every keyword and its assigned ID. From this table, you can see that SID 45 for example, came from the AdWords keyword ‘Blue Widget’.

Each time a sale is made, an SID is appended to the sale and you can reverse track that to the keyword level to see which keywords are performing for you. Obviously you can cut the ones that arent.

Working with WordPress

For my affiliate sites I like to use WordPress. I like to use wordpress because its easy to update, has thousands of available free themes online and has a virtually unlimited stream of plugins and extras to help give my users a more comprehensive experience. Anyway, I found that if I used Xtreme Conversions (the none Pro version), that although it was tracking my keywords well, I couldn’t quite figure out how to set it up so that the code that it generates only needed to be pasted into my header.php file. If I only had one static landing page then the XC code and setup would have been perfect but because WordPress uses the same header include to generate every page, I found that it was generating an extra ‘frequency’ each time a page was loaded, even by the same user, and this distorted my stats. If you go and have a look at the Xtreme Conversions page, you will see some screenshots that will make more sense of what I’m talking about.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, the only way I could get it working properly with my wordpress pages was to either upgrade to the Pro version or install a php plugin to wordpress that would allow me to insert php code directly to posts. I tried the php plugin but it still did not work as intended and by that point, I was fed up with faffing around so looked for another alternative.

Simple, Free, Effective Way to Track AdWords Keywords via CJ

I went back to google and tried again. This time I found an old thread on the Digital Point forum that showed me what I needed to do in a nutshell. Now although this didn’t work for me right out of the hat, it did lead me to the location where I was finally able to put the whole thing together and this is how I did it:

1. Log into your AdWords campaign and setup all of your different ads so that they pass the exact keyword search typed in by the user to get to you. With Google AdWords, you can use the Dynamic Keyword Insertion to achieve this goal like so:

Your adwords destination url:

http://www.yourdomainhere.com/yourlandingpagehere.php?kw={keyword}

You can see the bold at the end. This is what you need to append to the end of your destination url in your adwords text ad/ad. What this does is it will add the {keyword} the user searched for to the end of the string so that the url passed to your page will be:

http://www.yourdomainhere.com/yourlandingpagehere.php?kw=your keyword

Now what we need to do is set up a way to pass that keyword to CJ by adding an SID to the end of all of our outgoing CJ affiliate links. So that the outgoing link would look like this:

http://www.cjlinkwouldgohere.com/cjlandingpageorproducthere.php?SID=keyword

This can be achieved with the following php script:

<?php
$keyword = $_GET[’q'];
if(!strcmp($keyword, “”))
{
echo ‘<a href=”http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2412142-10482525?sid=Default”>Anchor</a>’;
} else {
echo ‘<a href=”http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2412142-10482525?sid=’ . $keyword . ‘>Anchor</a>’;
}
?>

You should re-write this code because if you copy and paste some characters such as the ‘ or ” can get mixed up by your browser/my page. If all of your links are being generated in this way, then you will be able to track your keywords via CJ and see which ones are making you money.

If you are using wordpress like I do, then the plugin you need to be able to insert this code where your link needs to go is called phpexec. Just write the code inside a blog post or page but make sure the code is inside some <phpcode> </phpcode> tags.

My thanks go to Jim Karter who helped me track my adwords conversions with CJ on his original post here.

Hopefully it will help you too!