Wordpress Landing Page - Tracking Keywords

I have recently hinted in some of my comment replies towards the fact that I have been hitting the PPC game pretty hard this month. Aside from the fact that I have spent a good amount of money, I have learned so much about PPC its not even funny! During my PPC experiments I have been using wordpress blogs as landing pages, and have had some pretty good success (in my worst case I broke even). There are a couple of compelling reasons to use wordpress for a PPC landing page, they include, but are not limited to:

• Fast, easy to setup
• Google QS bot loves them as much as the Googlebot web spider
• You can write FAKE comments/testimonials

This is great and all, but there is one thing you will find is very difficult to do using this method: Tracking keywords.

When you create your own static/HTML/PHP landing pages, you can include any kind of server side code in them you want. This is how many people track which keywords are converting and not converting. However, with wordpress, the software does not let you enter in PHP code directly into the posts, so its very difficult to track keywords using the /?keyword=example method. So whats an affiliate to do?

To solve this problem I started searching for a plugin that was made to specifically track keywords, and while I did find one, it just wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. Eventually I decided to just search for a plugin that would let me write PHP code directly into my wordpress blog entries, and I found just that with the PHP-EXEC for Wordpress. This plugin lets you enter working PHP code, right in your posts.

What do I do with it?

I’m going to go ahead and make the assumption that you have never written a line of PHP in your life, so hopefully you can follow this if you ever decided to use Wordpress as a landing page anytime in the future.

• Install and activate the plugin. There is documentation on the plugin’s page to help you through this, its pretty simple.
• Turn off the visual wordpress editor. To do this:
  • In the Wordpress admin panel, click “Users”
  • Select the user you use to write blog posts
  • In the upper left corner, untick “Use Visual Editor When writing”

Write a New Post, and insert the following code:

<?

$keyword = $_GET[’keyword’];
if($keyword == “”){
$keyword = “none”;
}

?>
Now you can write your affiliate URLs like this:


http://www.myoffer.com/blah/blah/?subid=<? echo $keyword; ?>


Thats it! Now you can use your affiliate networks subid tracking to figure out exactly which keywords are converting, and get rid of the ons that aren’t. If you are confused as to what all of this means, please see an example of how I did this HERE. Take note of what the URL says when you hover over a link!

Bonus!

As a sweet little bonus, you can also use

echo $some_text;

anywhere in the post, which means your can insert dynamic content based on the keyword the user entered, right inside of a blog post. Score.