AdWords Tracking Made Easy

We’ve been talking a lot lately about how important tracking is if you want to make money with Google Adwords. But how do you track? Are there any tools that would make it easier? Any step-by-step guides? Let’s go back to Matt Levenhagen and see what he has to say about it.

Any tools you recommend to make it easier to track?

There are a variety of tools out there to help you track.  I’ll tell you what I use the most, but it’s not limited to that.  I have members that use solutions I don’t, but they build their sites a little differently or have a different overall approach – different solutions make more sense depending on the scripts, website solutions you’re using, and the affiliate program/network tools available to you.

For me “Xtreme Conversions” is absolutely one of my most important tools to help me understand exactly what’s being searched and what’s converting in the markets I’m in.  You can see a review I did for it on my own blog when it first came out.

I still use it today: it’s not perfect, but it does a good enough job… in fact, it’s more integrated into my business today than when I first wrote that review!

It not only helps me understand what people searched to find my landing pages, but it’s also my “go to” tool now for Direct to Merchant campaigns.  I run all the keywords I need to track in detail through XC.

XC will tell you exactly what keyword was plugged in to find your site (how broad, phrase match was modified), it will tell you what the bid keyword was alongside that and the domain it originated from.  Powerful stuff!

I also use Google Analytics extensively… it’s extremely helpful to find out much more detail about your traffic.  It’s great to build something called goals/funnels where you can track the actions your visitors make.  Really good if you are list building like I am because you may have a series of things you have your traffic do and you need to know what’s working!

I recommend finding a good Split Testing script for your website.  We didn’t really get into it here, but not only do you track and test things in your account, but you must be testing your landing pages to improve conversions and action percentages.  So tracking isn’t limited to just inside your account and links.

And then a good spreadsheets program like Excel helps you study your results over time. That sounds really boring and basic, but it’s essential for me.  I spend a lot of time manipulating data, analyzing data, tracking my progress with my account (and projects) and do a lot of planning using spreadsheets.

There are a few other solutions like Link Management tools that help me manage everything.  I won’t get into everything I use here, but the bottom line is to keep it as simple as possible.  There are a lot of solutions out there and it all depends on your focus.  Someone that does mostly list building isn’t going to need the same solutions those building only affiliate product stores use.

Even in my Blast Membership, there are people doing a variety of things.  So when you find your way to our private forum, you’ll find discussions about a wide range of tools.  But that doesn’t mean you’ll use all of them or need them all.

I keep my approach as simple as possible.  I think that’s the real secret to success in this business.  I’ll test new fangled solutions that come out, but that doesn’t mean I force myself to use it long term if it doesn’t help my bottom line.

There are many solutions that come out that just replicate what I’m already doing or I know up front will only derail what I’ve already got in place for my particular model.

My advice is to pick a way of doing things, find the right combination of solutions that work for you and stick with it…. Master that approach.  Over the long haul, you’ll make more money because you are more focused.

It took me a few years to settle on the solutions I’m using.  Start with one, master it, reinvest your profits and grow your tools over time as you can.  But don’t get overwhelmed thinking you need it all in place today to succeed!

It’s the same thing with tracking in general.  Learn how to track one thing, get good at it and learn another.  Your skills grow over time with use.

Adwords Tracking Helps You Make More Money

We’ve been talking about AdWords Tracking for a while now: it’s important, it’s not hard to do, and best of all, it will help you make money with AdWords.

I asked Matt: How does tracking help you make more money?

It helps me make money in every way! It helps me make profitable decisions!

It has a tremendous impact on cost savings and also in terms of expanding profits through learning from that information, adding more keywords, modifying how keywords are targeted and more.

This is a decision based business: you can’t just put something up and hope it succeeds on its own power. Only in the testing stage are we really in the dark. Over time, you focus on what’s working in your account and track things in more and more detail. So it’s a process that expands as your campaign ages and grows.

You have to become intimate with each keyword term that is contributing to your bottom line, learn everything you can about it and mold its influence.

Not tracking at all is like throwing money out the window. You might as well pull out a stack of $100 bills, go out on the sidewalk, set the bills on the sidewalk and walk away. Because that is the level of impact not taking tracking serious can have.

Beyond learning how to choose and target quality merchants, keywords and how to build campaigns that Google loves, tracking is just as important for the long term health of your account and the ability to make more and more profits.

It can mean the difference between losing money and making big profits.

If you are looking for step-by-step help for your Adwords campaigns, and want to make profitable decisions, Matt’s Campaign Blasts will do that for you and more. There are so many success stories at Matt’s forum, you can’t help but be inspired!

Is Google AdWords Tracking Important?

In the past several days here we’ve been talking about tracking your Google AdWords campaigns. So far, we learned there are 4 types of tracking:

Campaign Level Tracking

Ad Group Level Tracking

Text Ad Level Tracking

Keyword Level Tracking

My next question to Matt was: Are all these types of tracking necessary?

His answer was short, but very important:

They are all absolutely necessary to consider at different stages of a campaign’s development.

Like any business, you can’t make profitable decisions if you are in the dark and only know broadly what’s influencing your business.

So, my question to you is: are you in the dark?  When it comes to business decisions that affect your bottom line, you need all the help you can get. Take some time to analyze your current campaigns and see if you can improve your bottom line by implementing some of the tracking  we’ve been learning about.

To your success!

Google Adwords Tracking – Text Ad Level

This is our third installment in the  Google Adwords Tracking series. If you missed the first 2, here they are:

Campaign Level Tracking

Ad Group Level Tracking

So, what does text ad tracking do for you?

If you want to improve your positions, Quality Score, CTR and even affect conversions, ads are a very important part of our business. They are not to be neglected!

With ads you have the ability in your interfaces to split-test them against each other to find better and better ads to focus on. That tracking is done by casual observation or there are solutions that can help you determine the best winner.

Set up projects to work on improving CTR for starters. Track those stats and split-test a batch of ads against each other. The ones that perform the best you keep: the ones that did poorly you cut. You replace the losers with some fresh ads to split-test again against your winners.

You can also test ads to see if you can improve QS and affect conversions.

Very subtle changes in ads, even a letter, can have a big impact on an ad group’s performance.

To learn how to keep your campaigns profitable, check out the Matt’s Campaign Blasts

Google AdWords Tracking – Interview With Matt Levenhagen

After the Google AdWords Interview I did with Lynn Terry a couple of days ago, the tracking issue came up. So, I decided to ask Matt Levenhagen, my AdWords mentor to explain how AdWords tracking really works.

I asked Matt 4 questions:

• 1. What is the difference between campaign, ad group, text and keyword tracking?
• 2. Are they all necessary?
• 3. How does tracking help you make more  money?
• 4. Any tools you recommend to make it easier to track?

And, of course, Matt didn’t disappoint: his answers are very thorough, and give great information. He actually wrote an entire report, an I decided to split it into multiple posts here, as to give you the opportunity to digest it in small, bite-sized chunks and ask any questions you may have.

1. What is the difference between campaign, ad group, text and keyword tracking?

It depends on what you control on each level as to what you track on those levels. And there are different tools or sources you’ll use to determine how you collect and act on that data.

Campaign Level – You’ll track things like…

• Locations, Languages, and Demographics
• Networks, Partners
• Ad Scheduling related

Those 3 things for example are controlled only on a campaign level. If you want differences, you need to split up your campaign into multiple ones. For example, if you determine you want to target multiple countries in different ways, you’ll need to create more campaigns.

Some of this information is simply gathered from your Affiliate Program and/or Network reports. You sometimes are given the information as to where the purchase came from, when they bought the items etc… And you can take those trends and change your geo targeting or ad scheduling to improve your profit situation.

There are also 3rd party scripts that help you collect that data. I have scripts that collect where conversions have come from; so even though I don’t get that in that affiliate programs reports, I can collect that data myself by intercepting that traffic before it gets to the merchant’s site.

I can also determine if I’m just getting the sales from Google or their search partner. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve determined that search partners didn’t convert at all, but was where most of my spend was coming from.

These are definitely things that can save you a lot in terms of costs and increase profits.

There you have it: Campaign Level Tracking!

Thank you Matt: excellent info about campaign level tracking. I especially want to thank you for the tip about Google search partners: we definitely wouldn’t want to leave a huge leak in our campaigns.

You can learn more from Matt at his Campaign Blasts Forum, where he teaches everything you need to start building an incredible, Profit Pulling Affiliate Marketing Business. He not only answers questions there every day, but shows his members how to go from keyword research to campaign expansion, and even holds campaign blasting challenges, which is how I found my PPC success.

Next, look for Ad Group Level Tracking.