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 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, 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, 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 categories that correspond to the search engines. For example, the ads on Google are placed in a category named google and ads on Overture are placed in a category named overture.

Create a category named overture. The ads corresponding to the keywords of Overture will be in this category.
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.
Create the tracking URL for the corresponding ad. For example, for the ad of the keyword shoes the tracking URL would be:
http://YourDomain/PathToScript/ad.pl?md=re&pos=overture&c=overture&an=shoes
And for the ad of the keyword big_shoes the tracking URL would be:
http://YourDomain/PathToScript/ad.pl?md=re&pos=overture&c=overture&an=big_shoes
Assign the obtained tracking URLs to the corresponding keyword in Overture.
Repeat the previous 3 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, the referring page that sent the click, etc.