It’s interesting what happens when you consistently track your PPC marketing campaigns… I had been doing a lot of testing and noticed some odd data. The funny part is just on a whim, I decided to test something out.

Now the results may seem weird but I tried the same campaign on two different PPC networks… Yahoo Search Marketing and 7Search and got near identical results. This particular campaign had to do with affiliate marketing type keywords, so a few other niches need to be tested still.

I haven’t heard anybody talk about this so I would love to hear from you if you’ve had similar results.

You may have heard from PPC marketing masters like Perry Marshall to add keywords to your display URL’s or even use keyword sub domains when testing. And the deal is that even if you don’t have a live page at that URL, not to worry about it.

Well, I have been doing this for quite sometime… I really like making my display URL part of the actual PPC ad. You can learn a lot by testing that out by the way.


Some interesting data…

I use Affiliate Prophet quite extensively when testing my campaigns…

Recently I have been setting up my campaigns so that the display URL and landing page match.

What I noticed from my data is a lot of non-referrer type of visitors to my landing pages. What that means is they’re not clicking a link to get to the landing page. Either they had the page bookmarked or they typed in the URL.

So I setup a little test to see if my suspicions were correct. Now when I search for stuff often times I’ll copy the display URL of a PPC ad and paste it into my browser to see if it’s even close to what I’m looking for. That type of behavior will produce non-referrer data, just like a bookmark.

Using a cool little link cloaking tool called Samurai Stealth Cloaker which also keeps track of click counts, I created a redirect for the test. This is so that the actual URL that is displayed redirects back to my landing page and I get to count how many times somebody either copied and pasted it or typed it in to their browser..

This is the funny part, the only place this redirect link is displayed is in my PPC marketing campaign for this particular test.


And the results blew me away…

Now on 7Search I got just 1 shy of the same number of PPC ad clicks compared to click count for my redirect link. And on Yahoo the numbers were identical. That’s crazy and made me think about how all that additional traffic could be used.

Basically for every 100 clicks I paid for, I was actually getting close to 200 clicks from my PPC marketing.

How cool is that? Can you imagine what what you can do with the additional traffic?

How about split testing for instance… Send your PPC clicks to one landing page and the FREE type in traffic to another and compare results.

You’re only limited by your imagination.

I plan on testing out some more markets and seeing if there are similar results. I’ll be sure to update this post with any findings…

This is something you can easily test out yourself. You don’t need a cool cloaking tool to do it.

You should at least add this test to your PPC marketing tool chest and see if you get similar results.

You might just be losing a lot of traffic to your site that you’re actually paying for and don’t even know it.


Resources:

Yahoo Search Marketing

7Search

Perry Marshall

Affiliate Prophet

Samurai Stealth Cloaker


Please leave a comment if you find this post helpful or have had similar or even vastly different results.


Bookmark and Share

Related Ad Tracking Posts:

Tagged with: • • •

Filed under: Ad Tracking • Affiliate Prophet • PPC Marketing • Testing & Tracking

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!