For the first Tracking Week post, I want to talk about tracking as it pertains to InsureMe affiliates. So I guess what I am saying is this stuff is going to mean a lot more to our affiliates than it will to non-affiliates.

Just as some basic information for people unfamiliar with InsureMe’s internal tracking system - InsureMe uses different links with “refby” numbers attached to them to track our affiliate’s leads. Every affiliate is able to create a virtually unlimited number of links if they prefer. Also, our affiliates can group together their links into “campaigns,” which are basically just a way of ordering links so they display grouped in our reporting.

Anyway, on to tracking…

One thing that always surprises me when I look at affiliate’s accounts is the vast differences in the way they set up their tracking links. We have some affiliates who use hundreds of links with cryptic names like “Glink5,” we have a lot of affiliates with a dozen or so links with different names like “Homepage Link” and then we have the affiliates who have one link for their entire account (some very large affiliates, in fact). Overall, it seem like the only thing that is consistent when it comes to people setting up links in their affiliate account is general inconsistency.

And that is just fine - whatever works for our affiliates works just fine for us. But with that in mind, I do want to tell you an effective way to utilize our internal tracking schema. We use a similar system for our internal tracking here at InsureMe, and through much trial and error we have found a system that helps us effectively keep tabs on our PPC and SEO efforts (although I am really going to focus on the PPC side in this post).

First off, let’s talk about links. I would say our main rule for creating links is use as many links as you need, but no more. A good example of going overboard in link creation is one of the Yahoo! PPC accounts I created a few years back. As an experiment, I created a different link for each of the hundreds of keywords in the account. I figured it would give me some really good keyword-by-keyword conversion data…and it did…kind of. In the end, there was just too much data to sift through, and the report was more annoying than useful.

So with that in mind, we tried out a lot of different ways of setting up our links internally to give us a good amount of information, but not so much that we are overloaded.

In the end we found, from a PPC standpoint, that when creating links for a PPC account, you might want to create links on an AdWords “campaign” level. That way you will be able to get the overall idea if something is working or not within a campaign, but you won’t be overloading yourself with too much data. With that said, if you are more of a data junky, I would suggest making use of the conversion counting tools provided by the search engines, which I will write about in the next couple of days. These tools will give you conversion data on a keyword-by-keyword basis, but not clog up your affiliate account.

Once you have created a link for all of your AdWords and Yahoo and MSN campaigns, you might find your reports looking a little busy, especially if you have multiple accounts with dozens of campaigns. Well guess what? We had the same problem as well…and that is why we created our InsureMe Campaign level functionality.

(Things might get a little confusing here so remember, there are campaigns within the PPC accounts, and then there are campaigns you create in your InsureMe account.)

I’m not going to take you through step-by-step directions of how to create and assign InsureMe campaigns in our system (feel free to call or email me if you need help), but I will emphasize that the campaign function is the best way to organize all of the links you have created.

The way we use the InsureMe campaign function is to group together the links from different PPC accounts. For example, let’s say I have two PPC accounts. One of them is an Adwords account for with I have created a dozen links in my InsureMe affiliate account. The other account has twenty links in my InsureMe account and those links are used in a Yahoo! Search Marketing account. From a reporting standpoint on the InsureMe site, having 32 links all showing on your main report will be a bit of a mess - and it takes a little manual work to separate the revenue generated from each account.

Using campaigns, you will be able to take your dozen AdWords links and group them together (for reporting purposes) into a campaign that you could name something like “Google AdWords Account.” After that, you could group your twenty Yahoo! links into one account that you could call “Y!SM Account.”

By doing so, your reports will start to display by campaign, not link, which makes it extremely easy to see the revenue from your two PPC accounts at a glance. But that doesn’t mean you are losing any link level functionality. If you want to see a link-by-link breakdown for your AdWords account, all you would need to do is drill-down on that InsureMe account campaign and you will be able to see all of your AdWords links in one place.

Pretty cool stuff!

(I am realizing that this post might be about as clear as mud at this point to some of you. Sorry about that…call or email me if you want to discuss this)

When it comes down to ir, I think the real rule here is to make sure you have some type of plan or schema or something that you use when you are creating your affiliate accounts. By putting a little thought into things ahead of time, you will be able to get the most out of the link and campaign based tracking that affiliate programs (like InsureMe’s) provide.

So that’s it for link and campaign tracking in an InsureMe affiliate account - tomorrow we will talk about the magical world of Google AdWords’ conversion tracking tools.