Nada Collar

People often ask how to track conversions of keywords. And occasionally someone mentions that you shouldn’t forget that you can use dynamic entry of keywords into your URL in Adwords. CPA Affiliates recently posted a good example of how to track your keywords using the dynamic keyword variable in Adwords.

As mentioned in the comments of the CPA-Affiliates post, the problem with using keywords in your URL’s is that you might be showing the merchant how you are giving them traffic.

I like to use Excel to create URL’s with my own tracking information. This can work with your own landing pages and a script such as shown at CPA-Affiliates, or with tracking from some networks (such as the Shopper ID at Commission Junction).

1. Arrange your URL to have the tracking information at the end. www.domain.com/abc.php?fu=bar&sid=tracking_info
2. Paste the base URL into Excel A1. Remove the tracking variable. ie www.domain.com/abc.php?fu=bar&sid=
3. Pick a base tracking number, this number is going to increment for each keyword, and will start with some letters to help differentiate different campaigns. For example aa100. Put this number in B3
4. Get all your keywords and dump them into excel starting from C3, going down to Cxxx. Make sure your grouping still works after pasting, If the quotes disappear, after you paste, go to the bottom of your keywords (while selected), and there should be a little pull down button for paste options. Select “Text Import Wizard”, and on step 2 un-tick Space as a delimiter, and change text qualifier to {none}.
5. Auto fill your tracking numbers starting with your base (aa100). Select it, grab the lower right corner of the cell and drag down column B until you get to the end of the keywords you added in column C.
6. In D3 add **. Using Auto fill again, drag it down to match with the bottom of your keywords. Copy this whole column into F3. These columns will match the Adwords syntax “keyword**bid_price**URL”
7. This step shouldn’t be needed but for some reason Adwords won’t let me use the default bid by leaving this column empty (even though they say it works). Put your default bid price in E3 and drag it down to the bottom of the keywords. Make sure they are all the same value and not incrementing Of course you can change any keyword to any bid you like.
8. In G3 type =concatenate($A$1,B3). You should end up with your URL shown: www.domain.com/abc.php?fu=bar&sid=aa100.
9. Auto fill column G. Select G3, click in the lower right corner of the cell and drag down to the bottom.
10. Select your whole table and paste into the Adwords Keyword Editor. You can paste up to 750 keywords.

Good Luck.

There are more details on selecting different URLs for different keyowrds on the Adwords help page.

Update: Here is a template where you can setup a few things and hey presto its all done. URL Builder. It’s slightly different to my guide:

•  enter base URL
• enter default bid
• enter first (Base) SID
• enter keywords (see earlier comments with tips for pasting)
• drag (autofill) the columns to match keyword list

Digg this

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 9:24 am and is filed under Adwords, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.