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Thank you for your help. I will let you know how we make out. We're excited to try out some of the unique features of your program... Thanks again!
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Tracking Pay Per Click Search Engine Listings

Are you advertising your website on pay per click search engines (PPCSE) such as Overture and Google? It is a great and cost effective way of driving targeted traffic to your website. The best thing with PPCSE is the fact that you only pay for the actual clicks to your listings. Thus you can control your advertising budget by bidding for the search terms (keywords) related to your site.

But, how do you track the clicks coming from PPCSE? Knowing that, even a small site can have more than 50 search terms, can you track different search terms separately? Many PPCSEs syndicate their listings to affiliate sites and other search engines. Can you differentiate these clicks coming from the partner sites and count them as part of the PPCSE advertisement?

DynAds Pro has features that can help you to track clicks from your PPCSE listings.

Instructions for Tracking PPCSE Keywords

By using the redirection and tracking features of DynAds Pro, you can track every search term you have bid for. We are going to explain how to do it step by step with an example where you bid for 2 search terms on Overture, namely shoes and big shoes. Consider that you want the visitor to land to http://YourDomain.com/shoes/ for the search term shoes and to http://YourDomain.com/shoes/bigshoes.html for the search term big shoes, respectively.

In DynAds Pro, every search term will correspond to an ad where the name of the ad is equal to the keyword. Also we suggest organizing all of the keyword ads into campaigns that correspond to the search engines. For example, the ads on Google are placed in a campaign named google and ads on Overture are placed in a campaign named overture. Finally we place all of the PPC keyword campaigns into a zone named ppc_keywords.

Tracking by using the remote tracking URLs

Remote tracking URLs has two advantages:

  1. With the auto-create mode on, you do not have to create the ads, campaigns or zones corresponding to the keywords (search terms). They will be created automatically when requested.
  2. The tracking URL uses named parameters so that you can easily change the URL of a keyword to obtain the tracking URL of another keyword.
Thus, once you obtain a tracking URL in the admin panel, you can easily adapt it to other keywords in the control interface of the PPC search engine, without the need to login to the admin panel of DynAds Pro.

Follow these steps to obtain the tracking URL for a keyword.

  1. If not enabled already, in order to enable auto-create mode, enter to the setup program, setup.pl. Go to Remote Tracking Settings menu and enable the auto-create mode.
  2. In the admin panel, go to Code Generator > Remote Tracking menu and select Remote link tracking for named items method. The menu is shown in the following image.
    1. Enter the URL of the keyword to the URL to redirect to field. That is, enter http://YourDomain.com/shoes/ for the keyword shoes.
    2. Enter the name of the account (your login user name to the admin panel) into the field Account.
    3. Enter the search term you bid for into the field Ad.
    4. Enter overture into the field Campaign.
    5. Enter ppc_keywords into the field Zone.
    6. Click to the Generate Code button and obtain the tracking URL for the keyword. The tracking URL will look like the following URL.
  3. Assign the obtained tracking URL to the corresponding keyword in Overture.
  4. Repeat the previous steps for new keywords.

Tracking by creating the ads manually

Sometimes, the tracking URLs from the remote tracking method could be very long. If this is not acceptable or if you want to control the keywords explicitly, then you can create the ads corresponding to the keywords manually in the admin panel.
  1. In DynAds Pro admin panel, create a zone named ppc_keywords. All of the pay per click tracking will be in this zone.
  2. Create a campaign named overture. The ads corresponding to the keywords of Overture will be in this campaign.
  3. Open the zone ppc_keywords in edit mode and insert the campaign overture into the zone.
  4. Go to the Ads menu and create an ad for each keyword you want to advertise for on Overture.

    For the keyword shoes, create an ad named shoes. In the Redirection URL field of the ad, write the URL you want to target, http://YourDomain.com/shoes/ and then save the ad.

    Similarly create the ad big_shoes, set the Redirection URL field to http://YourDomain.com/shoes/bigshoes.html and save it.

  5. Open the campaign overture in edit mode, and add the ads created in the previous step into the campaign.
  6. In order to obtain the tracking URLs for the keyword ads, go to the Code Generator > URL Redirection menu. Select the ad in the table and click to the Get URL button. The tracking URL will look like the following sample URL:
  7. Assign the obtained tracking URLs to the corresponding keyword in Overture.
  8. Repeat the previous 4 steps for new keywords.

Now, whenever a visitor clicks to your listing on Overture or on a search engine powered by Overture, A click record will be saved for the corresponding search term and the visitor will be re-directed to the original URL. You can obtain detailed reports of the keywords from the Reports menu of the admin panel.

Thus, you can compare your counts to those reported by the PPCSE. Plus, you can obtain progress reports, and histogram reports for any time frame, which are not provided by PPCSE reports. Moreover, you can obtain reports for unique visitors for the given conditions and eliminate short term repeat visitors. By generating a log report, you can see the details of every single click such as exact time of the event, IP of the visitor, country of the visitor, the referring page that sent the click, etc.


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