Publishers often have questions about using affiliate links in the Google Adwords contextual advertising system. In this article, we’ll discuss how and where to insert affiliate links, plus how to transfer the necessary parameters from Adwords to affiliate network for further analysis and ad optimization.
Affiliate links need to be inserted in the tracking template, and a direct link specified to the advertiser’s website in the Final URL field. If the Final URL field contains a redirected affiliate link, your ad will be rejected because of a “Mismatch between the Display URL and Final URL.”
You can specify a tracking template for your account, campaign, ad group or key phrase. If there are several tracking templates at different levels, then the template with the narrowest scope will be used. Please see Help to find out more about tracking templates.
Your ad’s affiliate link should be inserted in the tracking template as follows:
https://ad.admitad.com/g/123asdfg/?ulp={lpurl},
where {lpurl} is the Adwords macro; when clicking on the ad, {lpurl} is replaced with the Final URL.
Users can also specify a common tracking template at the account or campaign level, so when a new ad is created, it will suffice to just add a direct link to the advertiser’s website in the Final URL. This is one of the main advantages of tracking templates: you do not have to generate a deep link for each landing page, as is the case with Yandex.Direct.
So I took an affiliate network and did a survey how is the traffic we send from Adwords to ads in admitad analyzed?
Subid tags in admitad and macros in Adwords are used for this purpose. For example, we can use the appropriate Adwords macros to transfer the campaign id, ad group id, and keyphrase id to subid tags in admitad:
{campaignid}, {adgroupid}, {targetid}.
Here is an example of the tracking template:
https://ad.admitad.com/g/123asdfg/?ulp={lpurl}&subid={campaignid}&subid1={adgroupid}&subid2={targetid}
As a result, the stats in will look like this:
They transferred the ad group id to subid1, so this screenshot shows the number of orders and revenue for each ad group.
Adwords also provides a variety of different macros besides those described here, which can be used to transfer click data and analyze this information to optimize ad campaigns. Please click here for a complete list of available macros.
EXCLUSIVE!
They have also introduced a new exclusive tool (other affiliate networks don’t provide anything like this): Integration with AdWords. This tool allows users to export conversions from admitad to Adwords, where Adwords statistics show which campaigns, ads and key phrases resulted in conversions. This approach helps optimize ads in Google much more quickly and efficiently. Users can also take advantage of the built-in cost-optimizer for conversions and conversion-based automated strategies.
The fetched table then shows the standard Adwords metrics for conversions: conversions, conversion cost, conversion value. Also, include two additional custom metrics:
- value — cost
value * approval rate — cost incl. VAT
The second metric allows to accurately calculate potential revenue: here we calculate revenue by taking into account the approval rate (as a percentage) for the ad and 18% VAT.
This tool will prove useful to anyone who gets a lot of conversions from Google AdWords related to a specific offer and is enabled upon request after moderation. To complete integration, there are a few things left to configure on your own in Google AdWords to receive access to the AdWords API. Please see your networks Help Center for more details.
