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.

PPC Marketing Pixel

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.

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