If you’re not tracking EVERYTHING you are probably loosing out on potential sales, simple as that. I use Xtreme Conversions (Yes, thats an affiliate link, hook me up or don’t, I dont care.) for all my tracking and it works great. Instead of beating around the bush and telling you need tracking for a bunch of reasons you probably already know about, I will simply explain how to set it up get it working.

Using XC you can generate a landing page PHP script that you simply add to your page, in almost all cases this works with no problems but for me it didn’t work and all that was wrong was that I did not have CURL enabled, after I enabled CURL it worked perfect.

In AdWords, your link will need to pass along the correct parameters so here is an example:

http://www.yoursite.com/LP/index.php?bid_keyword={keyword}&campaign=CampaignName&ad=Ad1

{keyword} = keyword the person searches in Google, it gets added to the URL and passed to your landing page where it is recorded by XC.
&campaign = Whatever your campaign name is you put that here so for other campaigns you change the name.
&ad = This is your ad name, I use something like AD1DT for First AD with a Dynamic Title or AD2ST for Second AD with Static Title. Since I split test my ADs there are never more then 2 running so tracking what one performs is easy.

On all my landing pages I use a php redirect to hide my affiliate links, that looks like this:

<?php
error_reporting(0);
$cookiename = ‘xconversions’;
$var = $_COOKIE[$cookiename];
?>
<?php
header (”Location:http://www.affiliatelink.com/xxxx?sub=$var”);
?>

This link adds the unique ID passed from Xtreme Conversions and adds it as the Sub Id of the affiliate link so when you look at your sub ids in your affiliate network it will show you a unique number for every click and conversion then all you do is match that unique number to the number in XC and it will tell you exactly what Campaign, AdGroup and Keyword converted.

Thats pretty much it. Tracking can be very frustrating to setup but it is vital to the success of any affiliate marketer, so if you have questions just post them here and I will do my best to help everyone.

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