You’re an Internet marketing consultant and you come across a merchant that is running both an SEO and PPC campaign. You ask them for some information about their campaigns. How many sales come from PPC? How many sales come from SEO? What are your highest converting keywords? What ad copy have you tried and what were the results? Which site layouts or homepage version have proven to be the most successful at increasing sales?

Now imagine that the client says “I don’t know” to all of the above. “All I know is that we make sales.”

They could be wasting money on campaigns that aren’t profitable and/or be missing simple opportunities to make more money. You’d probably think they were nuts (or in severe need of online marketing education).

So it amazes me how many affiliates (especially non PPC based affiliates) ARE that merchant.

Successful affiliates know they must treat affiliate marketing like they would any other business. And businesses need to know which marketing campaigns and which sales channels are working.

But merchants have the ability to place tracking information on the thank you page. We as affiliates (usually) do not. So how do we track which of our efforts are producing and which aren’t?

Sub-campaign tracking codes.

Sub-campaign tracking codes are called something different by every almost every large network. Commission Junction and Pepperjam call them SID codes. Linkshare refers to them as “Signatures” while Google Affiliate Network calls them MID codes. ShareASale uses yet another term calling them “Afftrack” codes and Clickbank calls them TID codes. And Indie programs can call them a variety of things depending on which affiliate software they’re utilizing.

No matter what the sub-campaign tracking code is called, the purpose for all of them is the same. They allow you to attach a unique identifier to each affiliate link you use so that you can tell which affiliate links are actually converting (and which aren’t).

Creating Sub-Campaign Tracking Codes

I’ve previously written a guide on how to add SID codes to affiliate links for all the big networks mentioned above (as well as how to view their reporting on each). So I’m not going to cover that here.

What I will cover is a few of the things sub-campaign tracking codes can allow you to do as an affiliate and how they can help you make more money.

Find Out How Much Your Banner Advertising Spots Are Actually Worth

It’s a common theory that most of the Internet experiences banner blindness. And you may assume that the affiliate banners on your website don’t convert as well as your in content affiliate links. As a result, you could sell yourself short when it comes to selling your site advertising space to outside third parties for a flat fee. But without using sub-campaign tracking codes, you won’t know that for sure.

For instance, one of my sites last month generated approximately $7,800 from the Commission Junction-based programs that appear on it. Every link is tracked by a CJ SID. Upon looking at the SID reporting, I’m able to see that $763 of the CJ generated sales on this site came from a banner advertisement above the fold while $698 of the CJ generated sales resulted from a banner that runs in the site sidebar.

This tells me several things. First, that these slots I formerly would have assumed to have been “ignored” so to speak actually generate 18% of the overall revenue this site earns (from Commission Junction). Second, it tells me that I shouldn’t be selling those advertising slots for any less than the amounts I’m making from them with the affiliate advertisements.

Lastly, now that I know these spots actually generate revenue, I can take it a step further and use A/B Testing to determine if different kinds of ads (or merchants) in these slots work better (or worse) and make adjustments accordingly.

Learn What Your “Money Maker” Pages Are

On one of my sites, I have a page that converts like crazy. I wish I could say it was carefully planned to do so, but it was a random layout choice for this specific page, and it worked. Big time. This single page accounts for over 28% of the overall site revenue generated through affiliate programs. We know this because every affiliate link that appears on it is tracked with a sub-campaign ID code. If I wasn’t using sub-campaign ID codes, I never would have been able to identify this page for being the success that it is. The revenue statistics from this page tells me several things.

First, this is a layout to continue to use on this site, as well as test it’s effectiveness on other sites in other verticals. Second, it tells me that I want to get people to this page. From an SEO perspective, it lets me know my top priority page to target for ranking increases. If I did PPC, it would tell me this is a golden landing page. From a site design perspective, I want to make it easy for users to see and go to this page. And if I want to get greedy, I can also try A/B testing the page with minor changes to see if I can increase conversions even more.

Track Which Inbound Keywords Convert Best

I’ll admit that the PPC affiliates I meet usually have their proverbial SID (MID, TID, etc) game together. They attach an SID code to each keyword they advertise on so they know which keywords bring them the most sales. Organic affiliates tend to ignore this aspect because it’s a bit more complicated to do so on the organic side from a programming perspective. (If you’re using WordPress, there are plugins out there that claim to do this, but I haven’t tried any as my own tracking is done in house. However, in the coming weeks, I plan to review a few on my affiliate marketing blog and hopefully be able to recommend a solution for the “programming impaired” going forward.)

But a word of caution when assigning sub campaign ID codes to track keyword conversions…

During a recent discussion in the SEOBook community forums, a member mentioned that he wanted to use the actual keyword as the SID code. Aaron and I both cautioned against this. The last thing you want to do is send the merchants you work with a list of which keywords convert best.

Instead, I’d suggest assigning each keyword a numerical ID to pass through the affiliate tracking code. You can then later download the SID reporting information, extract the SID codes and match them to the referral keywords each number was assigned to in order to see which keywords are making you the most money, without giving away the “farm” to the merchant.

We all know the obvious – check traffic volume for keywords in the niche using your favorite keyword research tool.

But just because there is traffic, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the “right” niche.

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way and below, I’ll share with you some of the things I research before deciding to enter a niche as an affiliate that is primarily marketing my site through SEO.

Check PPC Advertiser Competition

First, I want to be sure the niche actually makes coin. Do a search for some of the primary keywords for the niche in Google. If you see that no or very few advertisers are showing up, this can be a red flag.

While you might have stumbled onto a fantastic niche that no one else knows about, it’s more likely that the lack of advertisers is a signal that there is little revenue to be made in the niche.

Knowing that up front can save you a lot of time and heartache.

Exceptions to this would be if the terms are trademarked or “disallowed” from paid advertisements (such as words containing the term “HCG”).

Check WHO Is Ranking On The Top Keywords

If you run a quick search for the top keywords in the industry and you find the top ten results return all big brands and no affiliates, you may want to rethink the niche, unless you are confident your site strategy and SEO skill level are good enough to compete.

I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m just saying that a top ten listing of nothing but big brands for your primary keywords means that the efforts to rank in that niche are usually going to require much more effort and skill than one where the top ten is an equal mix of merchant and affiliates.

Check WHAT Is Ranking On The Top Keywords

If the top ten results are all top level domains (www.theirsite.com), then the industry is likely harder to compete in from an SEO perspective than a result that also includes individual page results (www.theirsite.com/page.html).

There are obviously exceptions to this rule, and the presence of all top level domains absolutely shouldn’t be a deterrent. But it will help give you a gauge on how competitive the space is.

Research The Backlinks Of Competitors

Once you’ve determined the space isn’t “owned” by big brands, it’s time to check out the “strength” of the competition you’ll be facing.

I’m a big fan of Raven Tools for all things link development.

Using Raven’s “Backlinks” tool (which is powered by Majestic SEO) I will run a backlink report on the top five results.

This will give you an idea of how many links they have and how keyword centric those inbound links are and how many (and what kind of) links you will need to compete.

You can then decide if you think you can generate what you need to in order to rank.

Check For Multiple Affiliate Programs

This isn’t directly related to “SEO”, but it’s important to look at since creating a killer affiliate site with real value takes time and effort.

While one program may have drawn your attention to a niche, I’m not comfortable building a site where the revenue source (i.e. merchant) isn’t easily replaceable if I ever need to do so.

Years ago, I spent time and effort building and ranking a site centered around a certain affiliate program and when it closed down, there was no “replacement” for it.

This was before the days of Adsense, so I basically had a site ranking on some awesome keywords that made me no money. Even now that Adsense exists, I don’t like to depend on it as the only revenue stream for a site.

You could potentially strike up some direct lead generation deals, but I’m an affiliate for a reason and that reason is that I like low-maintenance, high return monetization without having to deal directly with consumers.

If there aren’t at least three merchants in the space running affiliate programs, I will typically pass.

Got An Additional Tip To Share?

If you have any of your own tips for evaluating an affiliate niche form an SEO perspective, feel free to share them in the comments.

Image used under license via Shutterstock.

Then you’d create pages for each with about 400 words of content on each one and then start working on your link development with some reciprocal linking. And if you were really advanced in your link development strategies, you’d also work on some one-way linking — attempting to get links from bookmark lists run by college students.

Next up, you’d sit and wait for the next Google Dance and deposit your commission checks into the bank.

[enter Edith and Archie Bunker singing "those were the days!"]

Nowadays, ranking is much harder, especially for an affiliate-oriented website. I’d imagine that if you could go back in time and explain to a 1998 affiliate marketer what goes into ranking in the 2011 SERPS, it would be the same kind of culture shock as showing Henry Ford a busy metropolitan freeway at rush hour.

Affiliate marketing has evolved. This evolution is not so much technology-based, nor is it really “fundamentals” based. It’s strategy based.

So how do you create an evolved affiliate strategy? The specifics will change from site to site, but some of the standards remain the same regardless of the topic or niche.

Brandable Domain Names

By all means, get a keyword in there if you can, but with today’s emphasis on brands in Google’s algorithm, you don’t want to be yet another keyword-laden domain. You need a more unique name if you expect to throw Google the branding signals they’re looking for.

Truly Unique Content

There is a difference between content being “technically” unique as far as a search engine is concerned and “conceptually unique” from a user perspective. Learn the difference and plant your content firmly on the conceptually unique side of the line. Social signals (more on that in future columns) pay off in the engines and no one wants to share your 400 words about “discount widgets” and 400 words about “cheap widgets.” They want to share “14 things you never knew you could do with widgets.”

User Generated Content (UGC)

The web is no longer a monologue. Adding the ability to for users to leave reviews goes a long way towards “value add” and offering up unique content that no other site has. Blog comments also serve as a way to engage users, thus creating the user-based signals of a popular website that Google loves.

There are plenty of sites out there willing to let users have a voice. You either need to be one of them or your users will eventually go somewhere that allows them to have one.

Create A Point Of Difference (POD)

A lot of people are under the misconception that Google doesn’t like affiliate sites. In my experience, that’s simply not true. Google merely hates crappy affiliate sites. By that I mean sites with no value add to the end user — affiliates that haven’t adjusted their site-building strategy since 1998.

You’ll need to spend time at the other sites marketing to your niche and ask yourself what they’re missing, what they’re not offering or how you can do what they’re doing better. You need to treat an affiliate site as if you’re actually the merchant. How do you make yourself stand out? That will be the key to having the link-building opportunities you’ll need to rank in the engines.

By working to create a brand that offers valuable content and gives consumers a voice — all from an “angle” that hasn’t been done three hundred times before is, in my opinion, the key to building an affiliate sites that not only survives the current (and future) search engine algorithms, but also thrives in them.

It gives you the opportunity to create link building opportunities and social strategies that wouldn’t be available with the affiliate sites of old. No games, no manipulation. Just a solid strategy that revolves around making your affiliate-based site a valuable resource to those looking for information, products and/or services in your niche.