Tracking Affiliate Marketing Keywords to Sales: An Unresolved Issue

Normally, my posts are based on useful information for making money online. Today, though, I pose my current problem and I'll looking for comments and feedback on the issue!

One of the most important aspects of succeeding in affiliate marketing is tracking your keywords and sales. If you are using PPC's, it is almost essential that you track the quality of your clicks. For example, let's say that keyword #1 is costing me $0.05 per click and keyword #2 is costing me $0.30 per click. Now lets say that I get 60 #1 clicks and 10 #2 clicks. They both cost me the same. But when I check my statistics, I see that my #1 clicks produce a 99% bounce rate (Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who immediately leave your site when they initially visit) where my #2 clicks produce a 50% bounce rate. I'll tell you right now which $3 was better spent! (I'll go over how to use Google Analytics to do this analysis in the future).

Well, great! I now know at least which keywords bring interested customers, but how do I evaluate which keywords bring BUYING customers? This is my dilema. One thing that stinks about affiliate marketing is the lack of control you have once someone leaves your website. You really cannot use google conversion tracking because you do not have a "thank you" page. I have spent some time looking at tracking software, but none of them seems to solve this problem (they require a "thank you" page). So I pose the question to my readers: How do you track affiliate marketing sales with your keywords?

And even if you do not know the answer, at least take a lesson from the moral of this blog: TRACKING YOUR KEYWORDS AND SALES ARE CRITICAL FOR SUCCESS!!