Affiliate Radar – My experiences

So far I have been doing all my own keyword tracking and analysis. It requires very little actual work to impliment and uses features Yahoo and Google have built in to maximize efficiency.

I decided to see what all the hype was about affiliate radar this last week so I joined. Great. Let’s see what happens!

The first campaign I wanted to track was an international UK campaign I am advertising via Yahoo search marketing. Let me explain how affiliate radar works before I continue.

How Affiliate Radar Works:

With affiliate radar, you download your campaign from google or yahoo and upload it directly to affiliate radars system. Then, affiliate radar appends a unique tracking code to each keyword. When someone clicks your ad, they go to that url with the unique tracking code appended.

So for example, say you’re bidding on “mens slippers.” Each time someone clicks on your ad for that keyword, they would go to “mylandingpage.com/mens-slippers-page.php?arid=A63A”

THEN, you use that tracking code as a sub-id. When you get a sale / conversion in your affiliate network, it will show under that keyword’s particular arid.

Lastly, you download the report from your affiliate network and upload that report to affiliate radar.

Now using all this data, they compile a report for you of what keywords are converting and what keywords are not.

There are some major issues with this system that I dont have in my own system.

Major issues with affiliate Radar:
- First. No international support for yahoo search marketing. Boo.
- Second. You have to reupload your entire yahoo search marketing campaign to be able to use their tracking values… and use their system. That means you have to pause / delete your current campaign and reupload the campaign. No thanks. Yahoo provides OVKEY and OVRAW for a reason people…
- Third. The amount of work needed is overdone. I can think of multiple ways that this system could be much more efficient.
- Fourth. If you bid on broad terms in google, you’re possibly missing out on keyword details! When you bid on broad terms in google, you often get hits for keywords that you wouldn’t expect and such. With the system I have, it takes that into account and allows you to see what keywords the person actually used to see your ad… not just what keyword your bidding on. This way, you can turn around and use exact match for keywords you find your broad match provide and bam… increase in CTR.

Besides the above, affiliate radar does have some nice features that are good. In my personal opinion though, It’s not worth the $97 a month.

I plan to release my tracking script soon enough so be sure to keep an eye out for that.