Although I am relatively new to promoting affiliate offers via PPC, I thought that might be worthwhile to share my Lazy Man’s systems for tracking my PPC traffic.

While the pros use nice custom developed software to track their traffic, I use a relatively simple spreadsheet. One worksheet contains the all of the offers that I am running and assigns a unique offer ID to each offer. The set of worksheets contains a tab with all of the keywords that I am running. Each record of keyword data contains an offer id for the offer that it is associated with and a unique keyword ID.

When I send traffic to the affiliate programs, I pass the affiliate a subid variable which is usually in the format of:

traffic source|offer_id|keyword_id

The traffic source represents where the traffic came from. For example, I use “g” for Google and “y” for Yahoo. If I have lots of closely related keywords with very low levels of traffic each (ex: typos), I will assign them to a keyword group and then substitute the keyword group for the keyword_id.
Most of the programs that I work with allow me to quickly pull a report that shows that the performance of each subid. This helps me to quickly assess how each keyword is performing for each offer without having to download additional reports or transform the data.

If I need to do further analysis, I download the reports to spreadsheets and use pivot tables to look at things like the keyword performance across all of the search engines where I use the keyword.

Future Improvements

The system performs well for me today, but in the future I would like to load my spreadsheets to mysql and create a web based system to manage the keywords. The new system would address some of the shortcomings in my system today such as tracking all of the information that Google can append via the AdWords auto-tagging feature (keyword phrase, ad variation, etc.).

I also have just started looking at the RevTrends affiliate aggregation services. I run offers from a number of affiliate programs today, and their service attempts to provide an aggregate view of your performance. They do not support all of the companies that I work with, and I am not sure of the level of granularity in their data, but it seems worthwhile to explore.

I will keep you updated as I make progress building out a system to effectively track my PPC traffic.