KeyTrail Can Make Life Of Every PPC Affiliate Easier

In fact KeyTrail can help you to discover which keywords lead to sales.

The information here might be very useful and relevant for those of you who employ pay per click campaigns to drive traffic to your affiliate websites.

Tracking PPC Results In Affiliate Marketing

Tracking the performance of every keyword maybe be very difficult simply due to the fact that a “thank you” page belongs to merchant. The most Google Analytics, along with other “tracking” solutions, can do is to tell you what link was clicked by a visitor to leave your website. To solve this shortcoming, many of us used the option of adding additional tracking IDs into our affiliate links in order to pinpoint the performance of every single keyword we bid on. This helped to eliminate keywords that did not perform. However this can be a daunting job if you have thousands keywords. I would literally spend hours comparing the performance of each keyword, so I can sympathize with affiliates who felt that PPC is a “babysitting” job, requiring much of your attention and time.

How KeyTrail Can Help?

KeyTrailThe amount of data collected since installing the KeyTrail tracking codes this morning is limited only to organic search. But not to worry, I see myself writing many “follow up” posts on KeyTrail in the near future. For time being or until I will be able to provide more data, I will just tell you what KeyTrail promises to do:

  1. KeyTrail can track sales you have made with ClickBank, Commission Junction and LinkShare.
  2. In the process in can identify which keyword or key phrase was responsible for sale. It is able to track your results across three major PPC providers: Google AdWords, MSN Ad Center, and Yahoo! Search Marketing.
  3. Provide you with easy to understand reports on the activity in #1 and #2.KeyTrail

In fact KeyTrail can do more than described above. I have limited only to one’s that I as an affiliate marketer am interested the most. In the future I will be able to provide more detailed data.

Pricing

To use the KeyTrail today it will set you back $10 per month with one time $30 setup fee. This will allow you to track up to 5 different websites, while tracking 100,000 page views per websites. I personally believe this is a cheap solution. It is possible to to loose much more than $10 a month on keywords that “do not sell”.

I only wish that later down the road KeyTrail will introduce different level of subscriptions that would enable tracking more 100,000 page views per website.

Conclusion

In the past few months, I have abandoned many PPC campaigns due to the fact that tracking keyword performance was really a “painful” procedure. I generally spent one day each week to do just that, analyze keyword performance. While I see this activity as essential one, I was hoping to have a product that would reduce this work from 8 hours to maybe just one hour or less a week. This is what I hope KeyTrail will do for me.

13 thoughts on “KeyTrail Can Make Life Of Every PPC Affiliate Easier”

  1. I was wondering if this product can help tracking keywords even if you have implemented redirects for your affiliate links?

  2. Hi Dave,

    Thanks for stopping by. I honestly do not know answer to your question but if I were to take a guess I would say no. I think the tracking is done via javascript + trackind id in affiliate link. If you have redirects, the javascript may not be able to grab your link.

    Again it's only my guess. Let's hope some one from KeyTrail swings by to enlighten us.

  3. Hi Dave,

    I am Nadav Samet, the founder of KeyTrail.

    Thanks for your question. The answer to your question is yes. KeyTrail can definitely handle redirections, as long as you set up the redirect in a way that passes the tracking code to the merchant. This is an easy thing to do with any kind of redirection technique, such as htaccess, php or javascript.

    For example if you use the url http://www.yoursite.com/go/merchant to redirect to http://merchant.com, you should make sure that

    http://www.yoursite.com/go/merchant?tid=xxxx redirects to
    http://merchant.com/?tid=xxxx

    If this sounds too complicated – don't worry. KeyTrail support staff will be happy to help you to set it up.

    -Nadav

  4. I was wondering if this product can help tracking keywords even if you have implemented redirects for your affiliate links?

  5. Hi Dave,

    Thanks for stopping by. I honestly do not know answer to your question but if I were to take a guess I would say no. I think the tracking is done via javascript + trackind id in affiliate link. If you have redirects, the javascript may not be able to grab your link.

    Again it’s only my guess. Let’s hope some one from KeyTrail swings by to enlighten us.

  6. Hi Dave,

    I am Nadav Samet, the founder of KeyTrail.

    Thanks for your question. The answer to your question is yes. KeyTrail can definitely handle redirections, as long as you set up the redirect in a way that passes the tracking code to the merchant. This is an easy thing to do with any kind of redirection technique, such as htaccess, php or javascript.

    For example if you use the url http://www.yoursite.com/go/merchant to redirect to http://merchant.com, you should make sure that

    http://www.yoursite.com/go/merchant?tid=xxxx redirects to
    http://merchant.com/?tid=xxxx

    If this sounds too complicated – don’t worry. KeyTrail support staff will be happy to help you to set it up.

    -Nadav

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