A Quick And Easy Way To Setup Adwords Conversion Tracking For Clickbank Products
One of the requirements of making a lot of money with your PPC campaigns is the ability to successfully track which keywords convert into sales and which don’t.
Certain keywords generate a lot of traffic, but don’t convert into any sales. You better delete those keywords from your campaign, because they only cost you money. On the other hand, there are also keywords that convert like crazy - they are called buyer keywords. I have keywords that show conversion rates of up to 15%!
These are the kind of keywords you want to pay special attention to. You put each of them into a dedicated adgroup, you constantly split test your ads, you create dedicated landing pages for them… In short, you do everything you can to further improve the conversion rates of these keywords.
Now, the big question is: How do you know which keywords convert into sales and which don’t?
In the past, you basically had 2 possibilities:
1: You setup conversion tracking in your AdWords account and you ask the product merchant to copy/paste the conversion tracking code on the products “Thank You” page. I didn’t always had the best experiences with this approach. Many merchants simply never reply to your request. Others say, they will paste the code on their website, but never do it… It can be quite annoying.
2: You use ClickBank tracking id’s (tid’s): This can work somewhat, but unfortunately the setup is a headache and also, it’s not very reliable. I often had conversions that weren’t counted using tid’s.
However, a while ago ClickBank implemented what they call: “Integrated Sales Reporting” and that’s absolutely fantastic. It allows you to setup conversion tracking for Google AdWords, Google Analytics and Yahoo Search Marketing in less than 5 minutes.
The setup is quick and easy, it works very well and it allows you to determine exactly which keywords generate conversions.
Here is a quick overview of the steps that need to be take to setup Google conversion tracking in your ClickBank account:
- In your AdWords account, click Reporting -> Conversions -> Create a New Action
- Provide an action name (for example: MyProduct Order Completed); Select Purchase/Sale; set the conversion page security level to http://
- Click Save and copy the tracking script into a text file.
- Log in to your ClickBank account. Click on the Account Settings tab, then My Account. Then click Edit on the right side of the Integrated Sales Reporting box.
- Click Add Tracking Code and select Google AdWords from the Type field.
- Enter your Google AdWords Account ID from the script you copied into the text file and paste it into the field “Google Account ID”.
- From the same script, copy the value from the label “google_conversion_label” and paste it into the “Purchase Label”.
- Click “Save”.
That’s all! Now you are ready to evaluate which of your keywords generate conversions and at what rate.
You can find a more detailed description of the setup process on ClickBank at: http://www.clickbank.com/help/account-help/account-tools/integrated-sales-reporting
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Very nice.. Thanks for the wonderful ideas and for sharing it to us.
Nice. Thanks for the tip. I just updated my Clickbank account.
My question is do you need both conversion tracking thats shown on Clickbank’s integrated sales report page? One is for tracking which keywords trigger people to look at your order page and the second one for successful orders.
My problem is that its hard to keep track of which keywords is triggering a succesful purchase because now it gets mixed up with people who look at order pages and then never follows through.
How do you get around this?
No, you don’t need to provide values for both labels (although I still recommend it) – the only thing you need to provide is your Google Account ID.
It’s simple to keep track, which keywords are triggering a purchase and which keywords trigger other actions:
* In your AdWords accound, go to Reporting – Reports
* Create a new report type: “Placement / Keyword Performance”
* Under advanced Settings, select: Conversion Type Columns: Action Name
* Under “Conversion Columns”, select: Conversions (1-per-click); Conversions (many-per-click) and any other attributes you may want.
Run your report, sort by the column “Action Name” (which might be something like: Purchase, OrderFormDisplay… ) and you know immediately which keywords resulted in a sale.
Will this method give you the conversion stats for placement targeting ie: which sites are converting?
Hi there Rob,
Dude, look, i was looking for an answer for this issue for a while. clickbank has no customer support.
these guys make a killing and cant afford to have a rep helping me out???
brother man, you helped out a bunch, for real.
Thanks!
do me a favor and reach me, we will talk and see what we both do for a living online, i am into social media and affiliate in other networks, we can exchange some industry info.
Peace,
Berger!
Yes, this method can also be used for the content network. To get the detailed statistics of which adgroups, URL’s… generate a converson (1-per-click or many-per-click) you need to setup a report.
Go to Reports -> Report in your AdWords account and select “Placement Performance” as report type. Under advanced settings, you can select all the columns you want to be added to your report.
Just play around with it and you’ll se it’s actually quite simple. Also, I recommend you have a look at Google Analytics - there is lots of cool stuff you can do with it.
Cool! Glad to hear this post helped you. If you use Clickbank a lot, you might also be interested in the following post: http://www.ppc-maverick.com/2009/11/clickbank-instant-notification/
This explains how to use Clickbank notifications to get immediately informed via email whenever a specific event occurs (sale, refund, re-bill…) and to automatically send an email (for example, with a thank-you message and a download link for a bonus product…) to people who buy from your affiliate link.
You can also use this to automatically add all buyers to your Autoresponder list - create a powerful “buyers-only” list you can sell to again and again.
Hi Robert. I didn’t understand this: Provide an action name (for example: MyProduct Order Completed); Select Purchase/Sale; set the conversion page security level to http://
Can you send me a scren shot or further explanation. Thanks
Ok, this changed slightly with the recent updates of the AdWords Interface:
Log into your AdWords account -> click the Reports tab and select Conversions -> click the button labeled: “+ New Conversion” -> Provide an Action Name (Purchase… whatever suits you) and select an appropriate Tracking Purpose -> Click the button labeled “Save and continue”
On the following page, select “http” for “Page security level”; select the appropriate “Page Language” and click the “Save and get code” button.
Then you simply continue as I explained in my blog post: Click Save and copy the tracking script into a text file…
This is awesome Robert! Thanks a lot. i was playing around tracking202 and clickbank, and content network at google, and it got really messy. This is a lot easier, it seems.
Question is, what about payouts that vary within the same vendor? I have a product that has a commission of about 20 and another that is about 30 for the same product… ..
does it track that, too? Does it track the amounts?
Hey there,
I am wondering whetehr google are more able to find out about cloaking scripts if I am turning on “Clickbank Integrated Sales Reporting”.
I mean, theoretically, it shouldn’t make a difference, no? Cloaking: I am showing google a content rich site, and send the user to an affiliate offer. So, if, for example, I really owned the content rich site, and had an affiliate offer on that, wouldn’t it be the same for google? Or does google know whether I am sending them to a content rich site, and that the conversion comes from a site not related to that content rich site?
I really have no idea how this thing work. Note, that I am NOT using google conversion tracking, but clickbank’s integrated sales reporting, which is kinda based on the google tracking. . . .
Vincent