How do you track sales using google as an affiliate?

[socialight]

If you've been succesful with google as an affiliate maybe you can help me in here...

I've been promoting affiliate products since january. I´m having good success, my checks are up to $1000 this month. The thing is, I can take a good guess, but I don't really know which specific keywords are bringing in the sales.

Most of the times I take my visitors from google to my affiliate "pre-sell" website, and then to the affiliate link... The question is, How can you track the sales for an affiliate your promoting? Do you ask him to place a code in his site? What If you're using a "presell" website?

Thanks
Socialight

[Steve6]

You have several choices. When you said you are an affiliate I assume you mean that you act as a channel for selling the products of a manufacturer, with whom you have a representative or reseller arrangement. I assume you run the "pre-sell" site, which then links to the manufacturer's "purchase" page, with a parameter to identify you as the affliate. Let us know if my assumtions are not correct. Assuming they are, here are your choices:

1. Get the AdWords conversion code added to the manufacturer's "Thank you for purchasing" page. This will be easy if this "thank you" page actually redirects the customer back to your site.

2. Include "&keyword={keyword}" in your AdWords landing pages. Then have the page remember the keyword in a database or cookie, and associate it somehow with something to identify the potential customer. Then merge the reports you get back from the manufacturer with your own database.

[socialight]

"You have several choices. When you said you are an affiliate I assume you mean that you act as a channel for selling the products of a manufacturer, with whom you have a representative or reseller arrangement. I assume you run the "pre-sell" site, which then links to the manufacturer's "purchase" page, with a parameter to identify you as the affliate. Let us know if my assumtions are not correct. Assuming they are, here are your choices:
1. Get the AdWords conversion code added to the manufacturer's "Thank you for purchasing" page. This will be easy if this "thank you" page actually redirects the customer back to your site.

2. Include "&keyword={keyword}" in your AdWords landing pages. Then have the page remember the keyword in a database or cookie, and associate it somehow with something to identify the potential customer. Then merge the reports you get back from the manufacturer with your own database. "

Hey, thanks for the reply... your assumptions are correct. I promote several products, most of them are through Clickbank though, so I don't have a tight relationship with the product creator.

The only thing that doesn't match what you said was that once our customer buys he doesn't come back to my site... would this still be possible?

If I ask him to place that code would he actually do it?

[MrSpeed]

I am not familiar with clickbank. However some affilliate programs allow you to add a parameter to the link to the merchants site.

For example with CJ you can add SID=keyword.
Amazon allows you to have multiple trackings ID's

Add "&keyword={keyword}" to your link in Adwords like Steve6 says above

Then in your landing page attach that keyword to the SID like this:
$strKeyword=$_GET['keyword'];

//Link to merchant
echo "http://widgets.com?affid=12345&SID=$strKeyword";

For someone like Amazon you can have conditional statements to select different tracking ID's

I am trying to go one step further than &keyword={keyword}.

For example lets say I have a broad match term of blue widgets. However I am getting my best CTR when someone searches "cheap blue widgets in california"
In this case my {Keyword} will default to my generic keyword.

If you look at your logs you can see what terms people were searching for when they clicked on your ad by looking at the referrer.

The referrer will look something like:
[google.com...]

Parse out the actual query from the referrer and then send that along as the SID or tracking ID.

[robertskelton]

If you had 2 or 3 main keywords (based on clicks), you could put each in their own ad group, and run each for a few days while the others are paused. It'll cost you some revenue initially, but will pay for itself if you learn that only one keyword is providing all the sales.

Rob.

[Paul_N]

The other option is to setup a redirect page between your landing page and the merchant's website.

For example, on your landing page where you would normally have an affiliate link, instead link to another page on your website.

On this page, you will include a redirect to the merchant's website using your affiliate code and a time delay of 0 seconds, and you will also add Google's tracking code.

Although this won't specifically track sales, it will track what keywords are at least producing interest.

After a reasonable amount of clicks, you can make a fairly accurate guess as to what keywords are actually producing sales.

This method also allows you to use Google's reports to find your performing keywords rather than consulting your logs.