Ad Tracking for Affiliate Campaigns

When it occurs to you that ad tracking is the next step in your evolution as a pay per click marketer, it is time to pat yourself on the back. You are about to begin a journey that has been traveled by all the super affiliates who use PPC advertising. In fact, for a great many of them, tracking is the sole reason they are now able to call themselves super affiliates.

More often than not, the thought of performing ad tracking is intimidating to affiliates. After all, instead of simply creating your ads you must now ensure that there is some way to track every click as a prospect travels from advert to landing page to sales page to (finally) the Thank You page shown at the conclusion of a sale.

This can only be done by adding a tracking ID of some sort to the URLs followed by the prospect as they advance through your campaign path. The often suggested course of action is to add a unique tracking ID to every keyword used to drive your adverts. This is not difficult in principle, but the devil is in the implementation and the post-sale analysis.

If your campaigns contain hundreds of keywords, or even thousands, the prospect of creating unique tracking URLs for your campaigns can be daunting. Then there is the task of analyzing the results when you retrieve your commission reports from the affiliate networks. Obviously you need software to do as much of this for you as is possible. But which software?

Recently I was introduced to an implementation of ad tracking that I consider to be rather ingenious. I say that because I am a software developer myself and the process used to perform the tracking conversions in this case is one that would probably not have occurred to me had I set out to create my own ad tracking software.

I think the reasoning behind the rather unique ad tracking, implemented by Jeremy Palmer's Optimize My Site software, has its roots in the fact that Jeremy is not primarily a software developer. Rather he is a serious pay per click marketer who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on his campaigns.

When Jeremy decided to build his own ad tracking system it wasn't because he wanted to sell the software. It was because he needed to figure out how to identify the components of his own campaigns that were working (and making him money) and those that were not resulting in any sales and were just draining his bank account with the advertising fees.

In other words his motivation was one of absolute necessity as an affiliate. He had to come up with a solution that not only worked, but did so effectively. He now uses the software to save himself hundreds of thousands of dollars every year by accurately identifying which keywords and ads are consistently resulting in sales.

Jeremy eventually released his software as an inexpensive commercial application known as Optimize My Site.

Recently I was able to get my hands on Optimize My Site and look into exactly how it works. I have now written up an in-depth review of the software for those who are looking into ad tracking solutions. To learn whether Optimize My Site might be the ad tracking software that you are looking for, get across to my Optimize My Site Review page and find out how Jeremy's software rates in my opinion. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at my conclusions.