As any good marketer knows, tracking what works and what doesn’t work to convert sales e.g. keywords, is vital to determining your success in a market. I previously thought that it was not possible to track keyword conversions for ClickBank, as I was not able to add Google conversion scripts to the publisher’s “Thank You” page.

I now know that ClickBank allows you to add a unique TID (Tracking ID) to your hoplink. This enables you to see the TID everytime someone purchases an item off ClickBank.

How Does It Work?

Well your normal hoplink would look like:

http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/

To add a TID to the link, you only need to add ?tid=xyz after your hoplink. Where xyz would be a unique ID number. So that your modified hoplink will now look like this:

http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=xyz

How To Put This Into Practice?

In an AdWords campaign, you want to be able to know which of your keywords ultimately converts to sales. So assuming you are selling a single product from ClickBank, you want to assign a TID to each keyword that you have.

keyword 1 = assign TID 001
keyword 2 = assign TID 002
keyword 3 = assign TID 003

and so on (You are going to want to record these somewhere).

You then implement this by putting your assigned TIDs to the end of each keyword’s destination URL on AdWords. So if we took one AdGroup as an example:

AdGroup 1

keyword 1 destination URL:
http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=001

keyword 2 destination URL:
http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=002

keyword 3 destination URL:
http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=003

Putting It Together

Once someone clicks on your ad and ultimately buys, the TID will be captured by ClickBank and will now be shown on your sales reports.

By matching the converting TIDs to the keywords you assigned them to; you may then be able to eliminate those that convert poorly and/or are too expensive. Of course you will also be able to determine which keywords don’t convert at all.

Limitations/Obstacles

Just to be clear, if you want to track each keyword, you will need to assign each keyword a TID code regardless of match type. So even if you have the same keyword, but with different match types, then each match type needs it’s own TID. So for example:

cookie recipe = http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=001
“cookie recipe” = http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=002
[cookie recipe] = http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=003

Now…at this point you may be thinking “holy crap!”. Cos if you had several ClickBank campaigns, with several AdGroups, containing dozens, if not hundreds of keywords and with different match types to boot, that is going to be one hell of a TID list you need to manually track. I would then say “Yep!” you are right, cos I thought the same way.

One solution could be, to keep track of conversions at the AdGroup level. By giving all the keywords in a particular AdGroup the same TID code. You would then, at least know, which AdGroup converted.

Now, I felt this would be OK during the initial stages of your campaign. When you are just testing out the response to a new campaign and don’t necessarily want to put too much work into setting up your tracking.

But over the long run, I would want a robust tracking system to see the conversion rates of my individual keywords.

Fortunately, there are options for you to automate this process. But it will involve purchasing software/utilities to automatically assign TIDs for you. Personally, I have started to use Xtreme Conversions. It helps by assigning TIDs automatically to my keywords. And providing a system for me to upload my sales reports from ClickBank to tie everything back together.

Whatever your preference, manual or automated, remember tracking is key.

Identify Market

The first thing I do is identify a market that would be worth while exploring. What makes a market worth while? Well I look at a few things:

• Is it big enough? – Is there sufficient numbers of people looking/searching for information in that market on the Internet. Why is that important? Well if there are not enough numbers you will end up not having enough potential traffic coming into your business.
• Is there existing competition? – Competition in the form of AdWords and/or people already selling products is a good sign there is money to be made.
• How much will it cost to advertise on PPC? – Really what I want to know is if I will be profitable if I bid on specific keywords for this market.
• Do I feel empathy for this market? – I want to know that I will be able to deliver something that will help people in the market that I choose (and feel good about it). If I can’t feel empathetic, I know it will be pretty painful to go through the entire product and marketing process.

Survey & Analyze

I have become a huge proponent of the survey process in creating products. Why? Because you will be able to tell whether you are going to be successful or not before any major spending on product creation and marketing even begins:

• The response rates and quality of responses from your surveys will give you a good sense of the demand for potential products.
• You will get a very good indication of how much traffic you will get and how much it will cost you to drive that traffic to your website. Which will be key to help you estimate your potential revenues.
• The survey responses also gives you excellent ideas for content/product creation.

After completing this part of the process I will know exactly if this is a GO or NO GO market to enter. If it is a GO then I will move to the next step. If it is a NO GO, I will just go find another market to survey.

Create

From the survey process, I will already have gathered a really good idea as to what content I will need to provide to be successful. I will also get a sense as to what type of product it will need to be i.e. e-book, video, audio etc.

On how I create the products, just one word “OUTSOURCE”. Even if it is something simple like an e-book, I will generally want to get someone else to do it. My rationale is that, I am not a writer, software developer, video editor etc., so I would need someone to do a great job for me (what would probably take me weeks or even a month to do, could be completed in a fraction of the time).

The only thing to really consider is of course the cost of getting this done. Now, here is a important thing that I have realized; because, I have gone through the survey process, I have more confidence that I will succeed. So I am more willing to spend the money.

Drive Traffic

During the survey process I use AdWords to drive traffic to my survey sites. Once I am ready to launch, I will again use AdWords as my main source of traffic. I like AdWords for various reasons, but, in the initial stages of my launch, I like it most because I get instant results.

I will be able to drive traffic and “kick the tyres” of my sales process, to see if it works (converts to sales). And it will take me a really short time to figure that out. Then once sales starts to stabilize, I will then completely go nuts and utilize other traffic generation methods with better confidence.

Track & Improve

You are always going to want to track and improve your sales process. I adopt several tools like Google Analytics, Google Conversion Tracking etc. to track how well I am converting. The key is to really keep improving it a little bit at a time via split testing. I split test quite a few things in my sales process e.g. AdWord Ads, Landing Pages etc.

I also take some small percentage of my traffic and divert them to survey sites. Where I can ask them questions to help me improve my overall process and/or product. If I get information worth implementing I just put it back into my process cycle.

This is the process which I am following in my business. I hope you got something out of it. Now,  I know this hasn’t shared a lot of detail, this post was really meant to give you a overview; and I will go into each part in more detail in separate posts.

But, if you guys could also let me know, what you would like to hear more about, it would help me plan and structure my future posts on the subject.

Have a great week ahead.