Affiliate Marketing With Google Ads: How to Track Your Campaigns Efficiently? (2024)

Affiliate marketing is an advertising model that enables third-party agencies to earn a commission fee for generating leads or traffic for a company’s product or service offering. With the commission fee, the third-party agency gets to reap some benefits for their sweat. Speaking of affiliate marketing, it’s of various types – one of which is affiliate marketing with Google Ads. Although doing affiliate marketing with Google Ads is contentious but still you need to stick with terms and polices of Google Ads.

Before diving into affiliate marketing with Google Ads, here are some things you need to know about Affiliate marketing.

• Affiliate marketing is a model where third parties are compensated for marketing a company’s product or service offering using affiliate marketing techniques.
• Cookies, analytics, and digital marketing are the major factors that are contributing to the billion-dollar affiliate marketing industry.
• Affiliates are typically paid per sale, and not by the number of impressions and clicks generated.
• The three primary types of affiliate marketing are related affiliate marketing, involved affiliate marketing, and unattached affiliate marketing.

Regardless of how knowledgeable you are about the industry, you’re probably wondering – what does affiliate marketing do? Well, here is what you need to know.

What does affiliate marketing do?

Affiliate marketing spreads the responsibility of product creation and marketing across various parties, and the ability of various individuals is leveraged for a more robust marketing strategy. At the same time, contributors are offered a share of the profit. For affiliate marketing to work, three parties have to be involved:

• The product creator or seller
• The advertiser or affiliate
• The consumer

1. The product creator or seller:

The seller or product creator could be a large enterprise or a solo entrepreneur, and they are primarily the party with a product to market. Speaking of the product, it could be a digital product, or a physical product like household goods. Sometimes, the seller would have to market a valuable service offering like a makeup tutorial.

When it comes to affiliate marketing, the seller (or brand) doesn’t have to be actively involved in the marketing process, but they could become an advertiser and profit from the revenue generated from affiliate marketing.

For instance, the seller could be a SaaS company that uses affiliates to sell their software product or an e-commerce merchant that desires to penetrate a new market using affiliate marketing.

2. The publisher or affiliate:

The affiliate markets the seller’s product to the public. When it comes to an affiliate, it could be anyone. Whether it’s an individual or a company, the prerequisite of becoming an affiliate is that the party has the necessary tool, and can market the product. Simply put, the affiliate can promote the product in such a way that can persuade potential customers to see the value and how it can be beneficial to them. And if a customer buys the product, the affiliate gets a commission fee.

A typical affiliate has a target audience, and they market products that serve the interest of their target audience. This way, the affiliate is recognized as a trustworthy brand, and more people get to be drawn to the brand.

3. The consumer:

For any business model to work, there have to be sales – and when you talk of sales, customers (or consumers) come to mind. Affiliate marketing is no exception – and customers are a vital piece of the system.

Affiliates usually market the product or service offering to the customers. And the marketing has to be done via a reliable channel. The channel could be YouTube, blog, or social media platforms. When the customers see the product and consider it valuable or beneficial, they get to click on the affiliate link and visit the merchant’s website. And if a purchase is made by the customer, the affiliate gets to receive a commission fee.

As a general rule of thumb, you must inform the customer that you’d be receiving a commission fee as an affiliate.

But what is an example of affiliate marketing, and what are other things you need to know about the marketing model.

What is an example of affiliate marketing?

Creating an online product may be somewhat tricky as a newbie, but if you want to dive right into making some money, you can opt to sell other people’s products and get a commission fee for each sale. The affiliate marketing model can work for vendors who are not in the digital space. Certain companies sell insurance policies by using brokers or independent insurance representatives.

These representatives are third parties who are not employees of the company. Their primary objective is to represent companies like State Farm and sell their insurance policies. Whenever a sale is made, they get a commission fee – and that is the reward for making a sale.

Affiliate marketing is somewhat similar. The difference is that sales are made online with affiliate marketing – and when it comes to the number of sales that can be made, there is no limit to it. Speaking of affiliate marketing, you’ve got to consider affiliate marketing with Google Ads.

Here comes the big question – can I use Google Ads for affiliate marketing? Well, here’s what you need to know.

Can I use Google Ads for affiliate marketing?

Doing affiliate marketing through Google Ads is controversial. Although you can use Google Ads to bring traffic to your website and there you can use affiliate link with proper context in your content but it is not recommended to directly use affiliate URLs as a landing page in your ad copy.

To generate a significant amount of revenue with affiliate marketing, you’ve got to be able to drive massive high-quality traffic to your website. To achieve such a feat, you’ve got to opt for a reliable online ad strategy – and that’s where Google Ads come in but you need to understand its policies very well.

If you’ve ever nursed the idea of diving into affiliate marketing with Google Ads, here are some benefits you should consider.

1. Google is the most popular search engine:

Google is the most popular and the most used search engine platform out there today. Most times, Google is the first point of contact for people who are looking for products (or services) that solve their unique challenges. With Google Ads, you’re sure of reaching a wide range of potential customers who would be interested in what you have to offer.

2. Google Ads is the fastest way to appear at SERP:

Google is paid by affiliate marketers to showcase affiliate ads at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). This way, they get to drive lots of traffic to their website. In the long run, a good portion of such traffic will be driven to the merchant’s website.

It’s important to note that Google Ads doesn’t substitute Search Engine Optimization in any way. If you desire good results in the long run, you’ve got to opt for reliable SEO strategies – and such strategies help you to effectively promote your product or service offering.

3. Ability to determine your budget levels:

Affiliate marketing with Google Ads helps you to determine your daily and monthly budget. There is also the option of setting your overall bid price, daily spend level, and campaign budget. In a nutshell, you get to compete in the marketplace regardless of your budget.

4. Ability to target a specific audience:

Affiliate marketing with Google Ads helps you target your preferred audience. Audience targeting could be done using demographics, income levels, interests, locations, and other parameters. It offers the opportunity to create a unique audience pool using common behavior and traits. Your ideal target audience should be put into consideration while figuring out how to grow your business using affiliate marketing with Google Ads.

5. Ability to Re-target potential customers:

Remarketing pretty much involves reaching out to customers who have previously visited your website or business without buying your products or services. With remarketing, you get to boost your brand awareness and also record more conversions.

6. Ability to create Ads in multiple formats:

With Google Ads, you get to easily create compelling ads using visual content, images, or texts. There is also an option of creating ads using video and audio-visual content. With these features, you get to match your target audiences with your campaign goals.

Moving on, you’d learn how to set up (affiliate) marketing campaigns in Google Ads.

How to set up (affiliate) marketing campaigns in Google Ads?

Here are easy ways of setting up (affiliate) marketing campaigns in Google Ads.

• Create your account on Google Ads Network
• Choose your Ad Campaign’s main goal
• Provide a detailed business description
• Enter your preferred geographical location – that is where your Google Ad will appear
• Choose your product or service offering
• Create the Google Ad
• Set up the spending budget
• Review the Ad
• Choose your preferred payment method
• Launch the Ad Campaign

For complete more understanding you can follow this guide on how to create Google PPC campaign? Make sure you don’t use direct affiliate link in your ad.

After setting up your Google Ads, you’ve got to figure out how to track your affiliate marketing campaign.

How to Track Your Affiliate Marketing Campaign?

Mainly CTR is the real metric which you can use to track. With the click-through rate, you can find out which types of links get the most clicks and measure the overall success of your affiliate advertising campaign. There are other metrics as well which you can’t ignore to track your affiliate marketing campaign performance better:

1. Clicks
2. Conversion rate
3. Incremental revenue
4. Return on ad spend
5. Cost per sale or cost per click
6. The number of sales actions.

Clicks

The number of clicks shows the level of exposure your product is generating across various affiliate promotional channels. If you record a high number of clicks without a corresponding increase in sales or no sales, then it means that your audience has no interest in the product being promoted or the affiliate tracking indicator is inaccurate. Aside from these two reasons, it could also mean that there is no correlation between your Google Ads and the landing page.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate is the metric used to measure the effectiveness of each affiliate. It’s also the metrics that are used to compare the performance of each affiliate channel in relation to the other. A high rate (let’s say >10%) shows that the affiliate traffic has a good affinity to your product. It could also mean that the affiliate is probably using suspicious promotional techniques.

Incremental revenue

The primary goal of each affiliate channel is to deliver incremental revenue. However, defining and measuring the metrics is somewhat tedious.

Return on ad spend

Return on ad spend comes to play when you’re on a budget, and you can calculate it using various techniques. One of the most recognized ways of calculating the ROAS is to divide the earned affiliate revenue by the amount spent (these could be the affiliate system usage cost, commissions paid to affiliates, Outsourced Program Management (OPM), affiliate management, and more).

Cost per sale or cost per click

These performance metrics are useful when they are benchmarked against other channels like Facebook Ads. From the insight gotten from your data, you get to easily identify the average price you need for acquiring each new customer.

Number of sales actions

The number of sales is of utmost importance. It shows the rate at which you acquire new customers independent of the revenue generated.

Moving on, you need an effective tool to help you monitor all your campaigns – and that’s where the PPC Signal tool comes in. The PPC Signal tool is one of the best tools to help you keep a close eye on your campaigns. The best part, you can use the tool to monitor multiple campaigns all from a single place.

The tool is built with a filter. This way, you get to easily customize your campaign and determine the metric you want to measure. The screenshot below shows how information is displayed on the tool.

From the dashboard above, you get to see the metrics highlighted in the red box. From the metrics, you can easily track your campaign using metrics like Cost per Click, Impressions, ROI, and lots of important metrics.

FAQs:

Can you run ads for affiliate marketing?

Various affiliate marketers hang out in different groups. Trying out these groups is a good idea – and if you’re on a budget, It is not recommended to try running some Google Ads with your direct affiliate links. It would be best if you do affiliate marketing in your landing page content with proper context instead as a bait for traffic engagement.

Can I use Google Ads for Amazon affiliates?

It’s somewhat impossible to run Google Shopping Ads directly to your Amazon products. For Google Shopping Ads to work, you’ve got to run the Ads to a domain that you own – but that’s not the case when using Amazon. To maneuver through this hurdle, you’ve got to run Google Shopping Ads to your website, and then direct your traffic from your website to Amazon with proper content and call to actions there on website.

Does Google Ads work with affiliate marketing?

It is not recommended to directly link affiliate URL in ads as a landing page. Affiliate marketers can use Google Ads to promote their business, but it’s worth noting that some Google Ads policies must be followed. Furthermore, Google Ads is a reliable way to get visitors to re-engage with your web content.

Does Google Ads allow affiliate links?

Affiliate marketing with Google Ads is controversial but still doing affiliate marketing with Google Ads is possible, but you’ve got to play by the rules – You can’t merely copying and pasting a URL from an affiliate network, and using it to run ads. Better to run ads for your website which you own and there you provide link with proper CTA and context.

Wrap Up:

Affiliate marketing with Google Ads is arguably the best way of promoting, marketing, and advertising your affiliate marketing business to the right people. This way, you will most likely generate a positive return on investment (ROI).

Whether you’re on a big budget or not, Google Ads will help you position your business in front of the right people. Alternatively, you could opt to join Facebook groups and sell to the people there.

When it comes to running multiple campaigns, you should opt for tools that would help you manage these campaigns – and that’s where the PPC Signal tool comes in. With the PPC Signal tool, you get to eliminate the burden that comes with managing multiple campaigns.

Now you know easy ways of doing affiliate marketing with Google Ads, what product or service offering do you want to sell using ads?