I was talking with Hock from Marketing Tools Review Blog last night, and we were discussing how to track ClickBank sales at the keyword level without having to place some kind of tracking code on the merchant’s thank you page. In this post, I am going to show you the method that I use.

Problem: ClickBank TIDs Must Follow A Strict Format

With most affiliate networks, you can pretty much use any text as the tracking ID in your affiliate links, but ClickBank has a very strict format. Your CB tracking IDs can only contain 8 alphanumeric characters and must start with a letter. This makes it impossible, in all but a few situations, to track sales from keywords simply by applying “{keyword}” as your tracking ID in your AdWords destination URL.

Solution: Convert Your Keywords To A ClickBank Compatible ID

What you need to do for ClickBank is create your own custom keyword database with unique, CB compatible IDs for each keyword. This can be expanded to implement conversion, reverse-conversion, automatic reporting, and more through an actual database and programming language (such as PHP/MySQL), or it can be kept very simple using nothing more than spreadsheets.

Open up your spreadsheet software (such as Excel) and create four columns: keyword, separator (**), destination, kwid (keyword id). You could also include two other columns (another separator and bid price) if you want to set specific bid prices for each keyword during this same process.

Next, fill in your keyword list and populate the first row of data (referencing the screenshot below). Make sure your kwid is is an acceptable ClickBank TID format (such as G01K0001, for group1-keyword1) and then just drag the right corner of your cells to auto-fill the rest of the columns. Excel will automatically increment your KWIDs.

You should now have a nice spreadsheet that contains all of your keywords along with their own unique tracking IDs and destination URLs. Simply highlight the first three columns (keyword, separator, and destination), copy them, and paste them into AdWords as keywords.

Continuation: More About Custom Tracking IDs

When you create your second ad group, simply start the first KWID at G02K0001. This format allows you to track up to 99 groups with 9999 keywords each. I don’t include anything to identify the product in these IDs because the ClickBank reports will automatically include that information.

You can also play around with the format of your tracking IDs to suit your personal needs. For example, if you needed more than 99 groups, you could do something like G1171785, knowing that the first three numbers are your group ID and the last 4 numbers are your keyword ID.

Result: Less Money Wasted Equals More Profits

Now, whenever you make a sale, you will be able to check the TID in your ClickBank reports and know exactly which keyword triggered that sale. Over time, if you keep track of all your sales, you will see which keywords are converting and which ones are only costing you money.

This principle isn’t limited to ClickBank, it should be used in some form or another on all of your PPC affiliate marketing campaigns. If you aren’t currently tracking your “sale producing” ad groups at the keyword level, you are literally throwing money away.