Simple Free Tracking Urls for Google Adwords

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:11:41 -0500

Ok I get the dork award. Nobody told me what I am going to reveal here, not one adwords guru, none of the countless ebooks I have purchased, nothing.

So I am going to give it to you here for free.

I already had another script made that will generate tracking urls that will work with almost any webstats type software such as hitslink, webtrends, clicktracks or whatever, but I have found a much simpler way to make them, and this also lets you track which AD gets you conversions. It is so simple, I can't believe that nobody told me this.

Here is the deal- a lot of people tell you about the google {Keyword} tag, which automatically inserts the keywords people search on in the title, or in fact anywhere you want in the text of your ad. What I didn't know, is that you can put it in the actual url of your adwords ad, and whatever people search on, will dynamically insert this into the query string of your ad.

Now, the other script at advertinfo.com generates tracking urls that generate the keywords you are ADVERTISING on. These keywords can be different than what the person actually types in.

Like if you are advertising on "free software" and the person types in "free software for me", and results in a conversion, it is "free software" that got you that in your adwords account because you were advertising on the phrase, You won't find "free software for me" anywhere in your adwords account in this example.

So these are two different things sometimes, what keyword you are advertising on, and what the person actually types in that results in a conversion.

Lets get on with this keyword tag tracking url though. Its unbelievably simple, and I can't believe I've been doing adwords all these years without knowing this. The {keyword}tag you just put at the end of the url like this:
http://mysite.com?source=adwords&campaign=44&adgroup=54&ad=3&keyword={keyword}

You can make all these things shorter to keep things simpler if you want, and put the whole code in one paramater like this:
http://mysite.com?source=awc1ag2ad3&kw={keyword}

In this example you just use one paramater source,which puts aw for adwords, c for campaign 1, ag for adgroup 2 ad3 for, uhhh ad number 3, and still puts the keywords in

Again, this gives you what the people are typing in, not what you are advertising on, which is a subtle difference. If you don't like that, then use the other way of making adwords tracking urls here

Rock on,

and get some sleep for a change

Adwords ROI and the SALES FUNNEL

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 13:25:50 -0500

The sales funnel- Increasing your Adwords ROI

I wish there was one rule for ROI, but there are so many business types, strategies and plans out there that it is hard to justify a general benchmark.

One thing I have found very eye opening though is to track ROI down to the keyword level. For every conversion, we want to know exactly which keyword, campaign, and ad group caused it, and whether it came from the Google site, search network, or content network.

Free Adwords Tracking Url Generator Script

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:16:10 -0500

New Free Adwords Tracking/Powerposting tool

Track what makes money in Adwords

I finally got the help of a programmer on this one, and have the first
version of the script up:

http://www.advertinfo.com/quick/qt.php

I am going to try to keep it free, as long as there is a reasonable
server load with people accessing it. Basically what it does is automatically
generate the tracking urls I described in an earlier post called the
poor man's tracking urls. Here's a little background for those not
familiar with how this works:

In Adwords, when you enter your keywords, you can just enter the
keyword only, or you can use powerposting. It looks more
complicated than it actually is. Basically it gives you a lot more
flexability because you can specify an exact price, landing page,
and tracking for that keyword at the same time.

The formula for it is keyword ** price ** url instead of just the
keyword. So for example if I wanted to send people the site
http://google.com/new or something, and I wanted to pay $1.25
a click for that, the powerposting would look like this:

adwords ** 1.25 ** http://google.com/new

Simple enough? Ok now lets take this one step further. I don't
want to just send people to a regular link, that just won't do!

What I want to do is send people to a link that has tracking info
in it, so that I can see which keywords and pages are MAKING
ME MONEY and which are losers. If we want to use the corporate
doublespeak of the big SEM firms I would say "Its very important
to monitor your ROI by keyword with advanced web analytics"

If I did that, well, I could charge a heck of a lot more for this service.

As a matter of fact..... Ok I won't. What we want to do is be able
to track of all the words we are advertising on, which ones actually
result in somebody buying something or contacting us, and which ones
just bring freebie seekers or the curious to the site, suck up all our
adversing budget, and never produce any results. There are
a lot of ways to use this with a tracker like hitslink to really hone
in on making better profits, but until you can make the tracking
links, you can't achieve all these great benefits, so lets do that
first.

Different trackers work differently, but almost all of them
will work with the paramater SOURCE, so instead of sending someone
to http://mysite.com, if you can at least send them to a url like
http://mysite.com?source=mycampaign you can start
tracking which marketing campaigns or traffic sources are working
for you and which are not.

Now that is a very good start, but if you want to be a real pro we
have to take this to the next level. We want to know, if somebody
bought something from our site, exactly what keyword they typed
in, what keyword we advertised on (not always the same thing), and,
for easy access, what place they came from, such as yahoo or google,
and for google we want to know which ad group they came from so
we can quickly go look at that campaign and tweak it a bit.

To generate these adwords tracking urls manually you can go here
to learn how to do it, but if you want to have them generated for
you so that you can powerpost them back into your google adwords
campaign here you can try out this new script:

http://www.advertinfo.com/quick/qt.php

Note that for our purposes we didn't need to be quite so fancy, the
script generates the code to track the keyword, the ad group, and
the source.

This gives a real good start, to generate these tracking urls
automatically so that you can power post them into your Adwords
account, and later on you can start tweaking individual bid prices
and be happy as a clam.

Rock on,

Individual Keyword Performance

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:39:57 -0500

Increasing ROI For Our Clients

One of the latest technologies that the search engine marketing department is now utilizing is the ability to track individual keyword performance. We have always been able to determine which group of keywords performed best, but now we can determine which individual search query is the top performer for our clients.

This information is vital during our optimization process and is used to create better advertisements as time goes on. To explain how this works, imagine that you have an online pet food store, and you are advertising on a number of keywords related to dog food. You might be advertising on 300 different terms and phrase combinations, but out of all the activity, you find that while many phrases generate traffic and visitors to your site, only five end up with people BUYING something.

You can then drop the unproductive keywords from your budget while increasing the budget of the productive keywords, and exponentially increase the ROI of your advertising. Once armed with this knowledge, you can go to other pay-per-click search engines such as Yahoo, and apply what you already know is producing a profitable result. You can roll out your advertising campaign to other search engines only on known profitable keywords, and decimate your competition!

For more information on managed search engine advertising accounts, contact 1-877-343-8911.

Poor Man's Adwords Tracking Codes

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:49:32 -0500

The poor man's adwords tracking code:

Let's say you want to track something and you don't want to give all your adwords conversion data to Google. I don't blame you.

Here is what you do:

http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=put+your+keyphrase+here

Just copy the above and fill it in with the appropriate variables.

If you also want to be a real nerd and track the match type as well, like in the example of the keyword phrases mycool product, "mycool product", and [mycool product] it would look like this if you wanted to paste it into your adwords account.

mycool product ** http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=mycool+product
"mycool product" ** http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=%22mycool+product%22
[mycool product] ** http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=%5Bmycool+product%5D

You can also if you want a little more control, also specify the price for just that one keyword. If you wanted to pay 1.25 per click for each of these keywords, here is what you would do:

mycool product ** 1.25**http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=mycool+product
"mycool product" **1.25** http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=%22mycool+product%22
[mycool product] **1.25** http://www.mydomain.com/?c1=campaignname&source=adwords&kw=%5Bmycool+product%5D

Then you just paste that into the appropriate ad group in your Adwords account. Doing it that way lets you tweak your positions more precisely.

Now, the only thing you are missing is a service like hitslink that lets you put a special
tracking code on every page of your site and then another one on the confirmation page after someone orders. But the above lets you have a lot more control over your adwords accounts if you have even a basic webstats program.

By the way, doing this can be accomplished with a very simple php script. Contact me if you want to make this script and become rich and famous.

Adwords Marketing News - adwords roi tracking

Simple Free Tracking Urls for Google Adwords

Adwords ROI and the SALES FUNNEL

Free Adwords Tracking Url Generator Script

Individual Keyword Performance

Poor Man's Adwords Tracking Codes