PPC Search Engine Internet Marketing & Affiliate Marketing

I have seen on a couple of forums people asking how to install a tracking pixel. I have put together a step by step instruction article below. These instructions are on how to install a Google analytics pixel. Which is what I am currently using on this blog.

The first step is to sign up for an account and generate your pixel.

Next Step is to copy your pixel which should looking something like this.

I like to copy it into a wordpad file in case i need to use it in the future.

Next go to the main page of your website and view the source of the page.

Then save it somewhere you will remember.

Then open the folder you have saved it in and then open the file in word pad.

Finally scroll to the very bottom of the page and paste the code right before the </body> tag .

Upload the new files to your server and your done.

Repeat these steps for every page you want to track. Eventually I will have a step by step instruction page on how to use php code to insert the tracking pixel dynamically. This obviously is a little more advanced ,but has some very neat advantages. If you are running a blog on wordpress the easy way out is to install this plugin. Next post we will discuss the differnt ways to target your audience when running a ppc campaign.

Developing and testing keywords is imperative to ppc advertising. The first thing you should think about when starting up a PPC campaign is what your target audience is going to be. If you are running a ring tone affiliate campaign than you are obviously targeting a different demographic than you would if you are running a campaign to sell coffee. The important thing to remember is that you are trying to target a person that is already motivated to buy or complete the action that you want them to. For instance advertising under ring tone is going to generate a ton of traffic put probably not a high conversion rate. Where as a keyword like snap yo fingers ring tone is probably going to get you a much higher conversion rate. Since the person typing in the keyword seems to know what ring tone they are looking for this makes it a lot more likely they will purchase a ringtone from the advertiser. There are several different keyword generating tools ,but i strongly recommend you take a look at wordtracker. I use this tool personally and I find it to be superior to google’s keyword tool. I suggest starting out with about 100 long tail keywords, then start to eliminate ones that are not converting and increase the spend on the ones that are. Check us out next week as we will talk about ad copy.

The problem I run into the most when it comes to affiliates and PPC advertisers is there lack of tracking tools and goals. Most people expect to throw in some keywords, write a quick ad and start counting the sales. One of the most important things to implement in the beginning of a new ecommerce or affiliate offer is to develop guidelines and tracking tools. A CPA goal is very important to develop in the beginning other wise costs can get out of hand quickly. In essence a CPA is the maximum advertising cost your are willing to pay for a user to purchase, fill out a form or other type of interaction that creates revenue for the advertiser. For example if I am selling widget for $100, the raw profit is $40 and I want to make at least a net profit of $10 then than my CPA goal is $30. Basically I can spend $30 on PPC Advertising to sell the $100 widget and walk away with $10. The reason I stress this is because most people just start advertising and just try to keep the cost as low as possible. This is a good idea except it leads to very few sales since you are only going to be able to bid on keywords that are inexpensive and have very little traffic. Now with our CPA in hand we must use our tracking tools to optimize the PPC campaign so we can hit the target CPA. Lets begin with a brief explanation as to what a tracking tool actually is. There are many programs that you can use to track your conversions Google analytics, Site Meter and my personal favorite Visistat. They all are able to track the user and what they do on the page, as well as how they found the site. The tracking tools can also tell an advertiser what keywords people used when they clicked on the advertisers PPC ad and whether or not they purchased something. This information can then be used in conjunction with the CPA to determine if a keyword should be removed or if it is creating sales. Than it may make sense to increase the CPC.

This is an example of what a tracking code (pixel) looks like.

I strongly suggest all PPC Advertisers become very familiar with there tracking package. It truly is the single most important tool every PPC Marketer should have.

Next post I will talk about how tracking directly relates to ad copy, keyword generation and conversion rate regarding optimization.

The video will show you what information the Google analytics package can provide you as well as what the system looks like.