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Keyword Conversion Tracking Tools

Marketing Fan — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:40:30 +0100

Hey, time to post again, since I recovered from my PubCon jetlag (good to see it took even Brett 1,5 months to post a recap), recovered from X-Mas, recovered from my vacation jetlag (Diving etc. in Mexico)

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?

Which keyword conversion tracking method do you use?

Why Removed Supplemental Index Labels are good for my business

Marketing Fan — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 12:50:18 +0200

Earlier this week Google has removed the “supplemental index” labels from the SERPs, and as with every major poops from Google the whole SEO scene freaked out on this!

Me too – because I have to thank Google for giving me – and my clients a new competitive advantage.

Why do I thank Google for removing interesting signals?

Well, until last week every wannabeo-seo and his mother could see (in the SERPs, see grandfathered sample below)

if a page had a problem with ranking…

There have been huge posts by Jim , Halfdeck and Halfdeck again and a lot more on what/why/where supplementals are. Even I posted about Supplemental Hell and one PayPerPost link buying penalty bringing pages into the to supplemental index.

Today however…

People need to put more effort into detecting if a page has problem due to being in the supplemental index.

That means a certain (large) amount of SEOs just won’t be able to do this in their everyday job.

Halfdeck has his own Supplemenal Detector which is a fancy JAVA application that is in fact a “pagerank emulator” – ~~and all pages below a certain threshold are marked as supplemental. I encourage you to download this data scraper, and I’m sure it works nicely – but haven’t tried it.~~

After playing with Halfdeck’s Pagerank emulator I must say that it’s a great way to simulate how the “link juice” flows thru your site and where you are actually wasting precious link juice (i.e. on useless stats pages). Halfdeck even implemented a “backlink emulator” where you can judge on the effects of an additional PRx link to any page you like… pretty cool tool – it just lacks TBPR live queries, but I hope he can add that in the next version.

But, in fact I never cared much about the TOTAL number of supplementals, but always if a single page is in supplemental. Why that?

Well, I guess Link Ninja Master Jim Boykin knows why – it’s because you don’t want to get links on pages in the supplemental index because they won’t get crawled as often.

Jim’s recent explanation on finding if a page is in supplemental pretty well details how to detect if a page is “healthy” at all – i.e. ranks for obscure terms.

If a page does not even rank for an obscure terms on it, you don’t need a link there.

So you ask again, why is this cool for your business?

Because the way to check if a page is worthy to spend time to get a link on it has just become a bit harder. You will need more work, time, effort, unless you automate it. Just as we do here.

And this is the perfect situation to use an “internal tool” (as many SEOs have) as a competitie advantage to get more and better links in a shorter time… heck – some link builders might spend another couple clicks on each page to find out if it qualifies for hunting for link.

We Don’t :-)

In fact we already see the “Supplemental Index” on top of our brower toolbar bar when we visit a page.

In fact we already see the “Supplemental Index” label as it used to be printed for ALL google users in the past, nicely embedded in the SERPs.

And in fact Google has bought itself now 10-20 more Google queries per SERP page my Link Arbeiter team screens when looking for links – plus we are inflating the pageloads of all those sites we screen by one…

Do you think that hurts Google? Nah – enough resources.

Do you think it hurts me? Nah – just got a bunch more proxy IPs to make up for the bigger Google scraping load.

Do you think it will hurt the SEO scene building links? Well …

I would assume a huge bunch of people won’t even notice a difference – after all even SEOmoz de-classified 70% of SEO companies for not knowing the SEO basic

Furthermore a couple of smaller equipped companies will struggle as they will need to do more a lot more work (as per Jim’s description) to get the same results…. and I mean – A LOT MORE.

Now this moves the benefits to larger scale companies (as Google is) that DO have an intact SEO infrastructure for their daily SEO work.

But the small scale link builders will first have to build that infrastructure, browser plugins and knowledge to make visible what Google has just taken from the public.

Thanks Google !

5 things I hate about SEO4FF (SEO for Firefox)

Marketing Fan — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 00:43:57 +0200

ok, that cat’s out of the bag… I hate SEO for Firefox…

Yes, I’m talking about SEO4FF – the cool plugin made by Aaron Wall/SEOBOOK which I higly respect…

but it just lacks some flaws which I already found sucky last year, and Jim told me he also had to limit it’s usage in his link ninja teams

Why? Well – SEO4FF just doesn’t scale. It’s made for one-stop shops, but doesnt help you when working in link builder teams

The main problems are

ONE user can easily soak up those poor max 5000/max 1000 request for Yahoo/Google [you HAVE to a private proxy farm to cure this, not to blame Aaron for this … if you want to know how to set that up – get some GOOD help]

Results are not CACHED ... what a mess… I bet Aaron won’t feel this on the 100mbit connections in the USA, but running on 10+ mbit here across the sea a couple times really sucks if yo have to reload all those crazy numbers just because you go back to a SERP page… Aaron – you should know that PR changes only every 3-4 months – cache it!

Results cannot be exported … ok – that’s an advanced feature, but still, if you employ a whole link arbeiter team of lin, hungry wolves then you need to make sure you can easily keep track of their results… and making the hand-write-down all the stuff into an excel sheet isn’t a very productive solution… a simple “SAVE AS CSV” feature is needed there

Customization option missing – parameter queries are hidden somewhere in Aarons code… damn.. I need to add my “secret link juice” queries nobody else should see… without bugging Aaron to bug his coder to implement it… heck – if I would have a chance I would fix those corrupt search queries myself

No on page results – whenever I found a page I want to see those numbers… still… or might want to lookup some of the parameters that I WOULD see in the SERPs if I had found it via a SERP and not a direct link… let me use the same tool from different angles

Luckily all those hassles are fixed now…

We switched to SEO Quake for the whole team of six people here…

and it solves ALL of the above troubles (excluding the proxy farm, which is an independent problem, which was solved anyways)

Thanks to those cool russian coders! you ROCK!

BTW: these are the same guys that built the funky SEODigger which gives a super long long tail result list for any site …

New Competitive Keyword Research tools

Marketing Fan — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 18:45:11 +0100

Digging up your competitors keywords is really nothing new using software like Keyword Elite …

But in the last weeks I came across some other tools for analysing the keywords that your competitors use for their PPC campaign…

why you would do that? well – engage in bidding war with them, find the nice and cheap long tail keywords to buy cheap even on Google, and of course saving time to doing (some of) the keyword research yourself… at least you save time on the “ME TOO” bidding … if THAT’s not a nice reason :-)

These are listed unorderd and without any review – go play for yourself…

SpyFu

Long Tail Adwords

KeyCompete

Notice that I’m not an affiliate of any of these companies above – so far – so that might change.

For researching keywords on your own, you could as well do the job yourself using the classic

WordTracker=

Trellian Keyword Discovery

You should also look into Keywords Analyser who combines the Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery accounts.

Google Free Keyword Tool

Google Free Traffic Estimator

Overture Keyword Tool

Overture Traffic Tool

NicheBot

or just take Aarons’ Keyword research tool which is FREE and really funky!

Enjoy!