Thanks again for your help!

“Granular data” is where we take a KW by KW level approach – lots of exact matching in PPC. We (again with web agency hat on) use a mixture of custom filters in Google Analytics to ensure we get the exact KW search not just an approximation of the match. (Adwords sometimes fibs about the actual distribution of a KW phrase and it can show up for all sorts of randomness. Any randomness triggers a quick addition to the negative KW list.) We back up the tracking with some custom queries on our own internal log-files.

Now this is where I see a dis-connect between standard performance tracking for an e-commerce website and affiliate tracking. It is relatively straight-forward to ascertain the ROI on a ‘normal’ website. For a ‘normal’ website you can quickly get to a KW-to-sale level of detail – you have all the data to hand. On an affiliate website this can get a bit more tricky… its not something I have done on my own affiliate websites but we do it for an affiliate client who we help on the web development front…. so thinking aloud ….

For affiliate ROI you can use Google Adwords/Analytics to pass in the KW variable, the cost per click. You can also use it to track an event (we use an outclick). We assign an estimated value to the outclick, calculated from the average EPC (earnings per click) of our individual campaign for the affiliate merchant. This takes you to a point where you can track the number of in-clicks and cost per KW phrase from Google, you can track the out-clicks per KW phrase from Google and you can apply an approximation for the earnings per click.

If any of the above makes sense (I was loosing myself at points ) then you can see we can get close to a an estimated return per PPC KW. Hopefully enough information to know if a KW is profitable.

You can take this to the next level and pass custom variables from your website to your preferred affiliate network. It is possible to pass the information coming in via your PPC campaign, hold it in the cookie / server and pass the same information out via the affiliate link into the affiliate network. You could then manually tie up the sale event data back to the PPC data. I see this as a manual process to get to the real detail but there must be ways and means to automate the matching up of data.

In my opinion, if you can reach an estimated earnings per click for your PPC KW campaign then you can quickly determine profitability of PPC against each merchant. However, the KW by KW detail requires a lots of head scratching and more brain-power than I currently possess.

@PAYG broadband – thanks for this info, I have one question regarding ‘granular PPC data’ – is this referring to having the conversion rate of particular keywords, or simply to running the initial 2-3 month PPC campaign to give you the keyword data?
Out of interest – if it is conversions you refer to, may I ask what method you recommend for tracking which keywords convert?

Once you know which phrases convert. Look into the chances of getting a result in SEO. You need only chase one or two non-competitive SEO phrases and you will be quids in.

All that money made/saved by switching to SEO for long-tail phrases leaves extra money in the pot for chasing the core PPC phrases more aggressively with slightly less pressure on the ROI of PPC.

In turn you could go on to be a high volume affiliate – and with the right program (increased commission tiers) the ROI will creep up again. (note to self – don’t get so carried away with optimism!)

Hope that helps and makes sense. Leave a comment if you need any clarification.