How granular should you track?
I see no reason why every single keyword should not be in its own adgroup. Why every single ad copy should not have its own display URL. Or why each match type should not be tracked differently.
Yes, it is a pain to set-up. Yes it is anal. Yes it matters. It can mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year difference.
The difference between singular and plural keywords can be huge. It is not out of the realm of possibility for the plural version to be a home run, while at the same time the singular version of the keyword could be bleeding you dry. Or the broad match is getting killed and the exact match is a huge cash cow.
The way most marketers set things up is by grouping things into categories and setting a single bid, with a single URL, and the exact same landing page and then either decide “this offer does not convert” or “this is a goldmine, wish I could find 10 more just like it”.
What very few ever think to do is take either of the above categories and actually break them out, locate the losers and optimize them and locate the winners and squeeze every last dime out of them.
In my experience, I have taken other peoples campaigns that were generating lots of traffic and lots of conversion, but were barely breaking even and managed to turn them into powerhouses, simply by managing things granularly.
For one campaign we have a keyword which is 40% of the total profit, yet is the 5th highest volume keyword. The Top 2 volume keywords are barely break evens. We cannot make them pay at any level. We only keep them around to drive some volume. If we had managed everything all together, we would never know that we were losing huge amounts of money on the highest volume keywords and subsidizing that with the 1 great performing keyword. The simple act of either turning off or managing those keywords to break even has significantly improved profitibility.
To give you an example of what I am talking about…
Keyword 1= lose $2,000 a day
keyword 2 = lose $2,000 a day
Keyword 5 = Profit $3,000 a day
balance of account = Profit $1,500 a day
Prior to tracking individually, the profit was $500 a day. Just changing 2 keywords to paused (or lower CPC the might break even or make a profit) we almost overnight went to a profit of $4,500 per day.
Don’t kid yourself. I have never seen a major category that did not have a few keywords that were just bleeders, either due to very high CPC or really low conversion.
If you are not tracking to the keyword level, you are leaving money on the table.
March 11th, 2007 at 3:45 am
Great post as usual. What do you recommend for tracking to the keyword level? On your campaigns do you use the google tracking, some other software, or a custom program?
Also, being a super affiliate probably brings the perk of getting your tracking installed on the merchants site, something that isn’t easily available to all of us. In fact, this is the biggest issue for me when trying a new product, if I can’t track I don’t know if I can make the campaign work. This becomes a nightmare if I want to try multiple products at once in a review format for example.
I’d appreciate any advice you might have on how to get new merchants to install your code.
March 12th, 2007 at 11:19 am
joe, most networks allow you to use sub IDs in your affiliate URLs. You can generate unique session IDs for each visitor and store which keyword they searched. Then you can pass that session ID into the affiliate URL as a sub ID. That lets you cross-reference the data so you can see which keywords convert.
March 13th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
I have wanted to set something up like that for a long time, but I am not good enough with php to fully code it myself. Do you know of any premade scripts for sale or download out there that I could use for that exact purpose? Thanks.
June 6th, 2007 at 8:51 am
Likewise, I have a pretty good system set up passing my subids on a keyword level, but the tracking and tallying takes so much time that I don’t have (new baby). If you had someone code it for you, could we put you out to ask them if they’re available to do another?
October 1st, 2007 at 3:25 pm
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