CPA Conversion Tracking I can’t stress enough just important the concept of tracking is to your CPA campaigns and the amount of commission you’ll ultimately make… Indeed, if you really want to make money via CPA, you must track absolutely everything; the success of your keywords, the source of your traffic, the type of ad you use (text or image), your ad variations (click-through-rate and conversions), your landing pages, the CPA offers themselves… EVERYTHING! When I’m promoting CPA offers, a lot of my traffic comes from Pay-Per-Click search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and in this case, it’s imperative that I track the keywords I’m bidding on. If a keyword is performing well and bringing me lots of prospects, then I’ll scale it up and bid a higher amount of money for that particular keyword. If a keyword is performing poorly, I’ll monitor it for a while and then eventually jettison it if it doesn’t improve. Although this sounds quite complicated, it really isn’t. To begin with, you can use the built-in conversion tracking codes which can be found in your CPA network, Secondly, all the major Pay-Per-Click search engines provide conversion tracking for you, right down to the keywords you’re using. This means that you’re able to pull these conversion tracking codes from your PPC accounts and have the advertiser place the code on their success page (your affiliate manager will make sure this happens). The advertiser’s success page is the same page that fires off a pixel to the CPA network when a lead has been generated. This tells the CPA network exactly who should receive commission for a lead, and by having the code on their success page, you’ll improve your chances of getting more leads. For the more technically minded, you could use two extra methods, depending on how much you want to track… If I am loosely tracking, for example, I will get each ad group with a PHP variable in the URL to track it loosely by ad group. If I want to achieve more thorough tracking, I could use a second method that takes the referrer, IP address and other information and stores it in a database as a number. I’d then use that number as a sub-id, to view even more information.
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