Tracking conversions for ppc -> aff sales

[waz67]

I posted this at the end of chrislingles monster thread, but it looks to be dead now, so I'll try again fresh here.

How are you guys tracking conversions from ppc traffic to affiliate sales? From what I've seen, most aff programs don't let you put your own tracking pixel on the sale completion page, but you can do a subid, so are you setting a different subid for each keyword, or perhaps actually passing the keywords as the subid?

I've just implemented a method in my own system which logs every visit to my landing page, storing the referrer string (which contains the search terms) in a database, and passing the database row ID as my subID to the affilate program so that I can associate sales back to a particular referrer (and date and time). It's actually quite interesting to see where some of the google search partner traffic is coming from, unfortunately I haven't had much luck actually making sales happen, so it's hard to tell how valuable this will be so far.

You guys that are successful at this, care to reveal if and how you're tracking conversions?

 

[Rob_TID]

Adwords keyword Group 1 > Landing Page 1 > Sub ID 1

Adwords keyword Group 2 > Landing page 2 > Sub ID 2

 

[avantrosa]

Adwords keyword Group 1 > Landing Page 1 > Sub ID 1

Adwords keyword Group 2 > Landing page 2 > Sub ID 2

Try scaling that with 10k+ keywords

 

[Rob_TID]

Try scaling that with 10k+ keywords

True - tracking stuff as an affiliate is an ongoing hassle unless you can get your merchants to place your analytics code on the conversion page in which case Google Analytics could do an *ok* job.

 

[gopher]

I'm just attaching whatever I want to track to the affiliate url, so it might look something like this: ?sub=msn-keyword-ad