This is a pretty obvious technique, but it might help some people starting out.
Sometimes you want to quickly test out a new niche by direct linking, and don’t want to go through all the trouble of setting up your tracking system, placing pixels etc. But you still want to be able to see which keywords convert. So here’s the quick and dirty method.
Just drop each keyword into its own adgroup, and for the ad in that adgroup assign a unique sequential sub id to the destination URL. That’s it. Since each keyword will trigger a unique ad and sub id, when it converts you can see which keyword converted. This takes less that a minute to set up in the Adwords editor. You can also use destination URLs for each keyword with them in the same adgroup, but I like the separate adgroup method.
Once you have tested the niche and want to move forward then you can set up your full keyword and conversion tracking. But you can’t beat the quick method for small scale tests.
This is a great idea Chad! I’ve been curious about how to do this on a test campaign. I’m looking forward to giving it a go now.
Thanks for helping us out!
Or you could quite simply append the {keyword} tag onto the destination URL where the SUB-id variable is in the URL, what is the benefit of doing this?
Ya, I mentioned that was the other option but I find it quicker to do it with separate adgroups especially with the adwords or adcenter editors.
It’s easier when do quick test for me to have separate adgroups for a keyword/keywords and I usually keep in to 3 KW’s per group.
After a few weeks I know exactly which are bringing conversions and which aint.
Good stuff! This is similar to how Matt Levenhagen’s Campaign Blasting method works that I tried out not too long ago.
Always with the good info. Keep it up! =)
This advice is spot on. I have been using this technique myself for initial quick tests.
You mentioned:
“Once you have tested the niche and want to move forward then you can set up your full keyword and conversion tracking.”
Chad, how is your full keyword and conversion tracking different? Care to shed some light on this?
Chad,
One question…I’m confused about how you pass the SID data through to the affiliate network. If I am understanding your setup correctly, you have the Destination URL but something like “http://www.myaffiliatedomain.com/25″ or something like that, and then that page of your site would use 25 as th SID for your campaign and you would then know which keyword converted if you checked on the affiliate network and saw you had conversions under SID 25.
I’m just not understanding how you pass that SID to the affiliate network…
I am talking direct linking so you dest. link would be something like:
http://xjump.blahblah.com/subid=test
That would pass the test subid right to the network.
Aaahhh, that makes sense, must have missed the direct linking part.
SpeedPPC is great for setting up 1 KW per adgroup and dropping that KW in the url too.
In addition to the keyword, I’d create a variable for each ad version that you might be split testing per adgroup, so tid=v1+{keyword}, where v1, v2, etc is the ad version.