Since I’ve been doing quite a bit NON-seo areas like domaining and PPC arbitrage recently, I spent an hour today to research on some more or less obscure solutions to perform click tracking measure keyword conversions. Some of that does have to do with PPC arbitrage, so there’s quite some money to loose or win.

Instead of keeping the list of products found in secret I thought I’ll just list what I came across today, including my thoughts of Pros/Cons

Google Analytics
well obviously this is the most popular package supports tracking your conversions, but I haven’t yet found out yet

• how to track the conversion of a “click” on an Adsense/YPN or otherwise PPC style ad unit (which IS the conversion when arbitraging)
• how to import keyword traffic data from other sources than GAW, i.e. YSM to track … and you WANT to see that!

Xtreme Conversions

Xtreme Conversions is a clickbank product I found today, haven’t used it yet and promises to track your conversions by keyword level. As usual the sales page is full of mumbo jumbo “you’ll get rich stuff” and makes this offer look a bit fishy at least, especially since I haven’t found any specific feature list on the page.

Their claim “The Entire Conversion Tracking Process Is Automated!” sounds to good to be true but I doubt it highly so. They say that “Xtreme Conversions will work with ClickBank and CJ and any other merchant that allows you to put tracking code in the affiliate URL.” so the steps that will be required at least will be:

• uploading your keywords to THE tool
• generating a destination url list with keyword ids
• uploading the keywords with keyword id tracking codes (manually to GAW since I don’t expect them to have an API access)

any other solution wouldn’t work at all.

It seems they require some PHP include on the top of each page to track keywords, and their sales page talks about tracking ClickBank only. Now well, that’s not very tempting.

But since they offer Clickbank-style refunds for 56 days this will be a sure signup so I can update you on that later. And I returned “Affiliate Elite”: to Brad Callen after 1,5 months because I couldn’t find any good way to use it (due to the lack of server power in HIS new backend mainly)

Affiliate Radar

This is one of the most comprehensive campaign tracking tools and I’ve used it for some months back since last summer to run a campaign in the dating market. As it seems I’ve already been buying into one of the better tools with that back then already, and the monthly charge of $97 speaks for that (as opposed to single payments with software tools)

Looking at the process diagram they we have above (from Affiliate Radar) you will see that it’s pretty well integrated – as long as you are fine with importing and exporting of data to/from Google,Yahoo,MSN … and the affiliate networks. This can become quite a tedious job and I found quite a few data conversion problems in the process which urged me to fix these CSV files in the text editor to make it run…

Summed up this means that you’ll never ever be “up-to-date” with your tracking but have a tedious “batch-style job” to do … at best on a daily basis… but at least AR offers “some kind of” support for 100+ affiliate networks reports, which doesn’t seem to be the case with Xtreme Conversions (I wonder if I want to spend any minute on that one still)

SeoSemTools

This clickbank product titled Pay-Per-Click (ppc) Search Engine Keyword Tracking Software promises keyword level conversion tracking, but I highly doubt this can be any good. Just take a look at their sales page. While it’s fine that they don’t try to run me thru a multi-foot-long sales page with sublimal psycho-tricks I hate that they don’t even show a feature and requirements list – and that for a recurring service to charge you $47 on a monthly daily basis.

No idea on those, but given that they offer CB refund style I might try that as well

KeywordXray

KeywordXray is another tracking tool, this time by the Rich Jerk and a freaking nice designed web site. It’s a hosted service, and again this means relying on somebody else to a) keep your campaigns and sites confidential b) providing the server power you reqire.

This tool is a $47/month service for the lowest volume and I guess this would require a longer trial as I haven’t found detailled specifications or even screenshots of their application. Any NO, def. NO, I don’t think that fricking sales videos with talkative ladies can make up for a detailled product specification. (damn, why does the whole web think professionals love to watch videos when they can get the required info by skimming some detail feature lists?)

Summary

I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, am still not where I’d need to be to not feel like a donkey doing monkey work and still losing money…

Even AR which had quite a bit of good understanding what is needed finally frustrated me with the inflexibility to sync campaign with GAW and especially to weed out non-performers or make structural changes (YEAH – you’d actually had to resetup everything within a new adgroup structure if you wanted to do that …)

What could you recommend?