If you have spent any time investing in pay per click advertising you'll be painfully aware of how difficult it is to come up with profitable campaigns. In all likelihood you have lost more money running your campaigns than you have made in sales or commissions. Unless you are able to see exactly which keywords and ads are losing you money you will never be able to turn a significant profit with pay per click advertising.

Well, that's exactly the problem that Jeremy Palmer faced as an affiliate. Now, unlike most affiliates, Jeremy actual was making a profit with his campaigns. In part, I suspect this was because he is exceptionally good at creating terrific landing pages. However, he wasn't making the kind of money he thought he ought to be making. He suspected that a lot of his pay per click budget was going towards keywords that never resulted in any sales at all, let alone enough to allow the campaign to simply break even.

What he needed was a way to track all of the clicks from his campaigns, from the moment someone clicked on one of his pay per click adverts, all the way through to the sales page of the merchants he was promoting. If he could see which keywords were bring in the sales, and which were just siphoning off his money without results, well, then he could trim the losers from his campaigns and really improve his return on investment.

That was the motivation, and Optimize My Site is the end result of Jeremy's attempts to create a tool which applies x-ray vision to pay per click campaigns. The bottom line is that this tool really works. It's not the only one on the market of its type. But it is the most comprehensive solution and it has the added advantage that it was forged from the real life demands of a well-known and widely respected super affiliate who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in pay per click advertising costs.

It would be great if software could be developed that was so smart it could perform all of the tasks needed to implement a fully-automatic campaign-tracking solution. Well, we are a long way from that point so it's important to understand exactly what you'll be doing when you use Optimize My Site to sharpen your campaigns.

After you have converted your campaigns to redirect them through the Optimize My Site tracking mechanism, which is straightforward and will be covered later in my review, there are three basic operations that you'll carry out to determine how your campaigns are performing. Depending on your level of campaign investment, you might perform these three operations weekly, every few days, or even daily.

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1. Upload Cost Reports
The first step to generating cost/benefit reports is to determine your costs. All of the major pay per click services make it easy to download campaign cost reports that detail how much you are paying to run your adverts, down to the level of individual keywords. Optimize My Site currently supports the importation of cost reports from Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Advertising, and MSN AdCenter. In practice you must currently paste these reports into a textarea form element within OMS.

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2. Upload Commission Reports
The flip side to cost/benefit analysis is to determine which of your campaigns have been responsible for sales. All of the major affiliate networks provide what is generally referred to as a sub ID which can be added to affiliate URLs to perform campaign tracking. When you download your commission reports from these networks this tracking variable allows the identification of campaigns that have resulted in sales. These reports must also be pasted into OMS.

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3. Find Your Keyword Gold
Finally, using the information gained from the cost and commission reports, and combining that with the click log that Optimize My Site has created during the same period, several different profitability reports can be generated that pinpoint which campaigns are working for you, which can be made to work for you with some tweaking, and which can never be made to work and should be immediately culled from your pay per click account. The end result is always more money in your pocket.

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I have given Optimize My Site a 5-star rating. I had to debate with myself whether perhaps I should give it 4.5 out of 5.0 because I can imagine improvements to the program that would make it the talk of the town. I'll discuss those ideas later. But the truth is that they don't represent simple makeovers, and their absence in no way reflects upon the quality of this software. So I'm giving it the top rating, which I believe it deserves.

In this review I won't be talking about my own experiences using the software to track my campaigns. My belief is that anecdotal accounts, though compelling, are always based on results that depend a lot on your niche and your level of skill as an ad writer. I am only interested in how well the software has been implemented, how easy it is to use, and whether it gets the job done. Those are the questions I ask myself when I am writing my own software.

That said, I have included a couple of video testimonials from happy customers of Optimize My Site who feel they can attribute huge improvements in the profitability of their campaigns directly to the software.

WHAT'S  IN  A  NAME?

It may seem odd that this is the first thing I want to address in this review of Optimize My Site, but it seems to me that Jeremy chose badly for the name of his product. A much more accurate product name would have been Optimize My Campaign.

I mention this because I suffered for years trying to market a product that I'd badly misnamed. So don't let the name mislead you. The primary goal of Optimize My Site is to improve the performance of your ad campaigns. The consequence is that your landing pages will appear to be performing better. This is probably the meaning behind the name, but I find it a little obscure.

A  FLASH  OF  GENIUS

For me, it's not enough to know that a piece of software works well. I have to know how it works. This gives me a feeling for the mentality of the programmer who created it. You can guess the reason for this. I'm a programmer myself, so I'm not going to use someone else's software unless it somehow strikes me as outstanding.

In this case, the feature that caught my attention immediately was the implementation of the tracking. Obviously the whole kit and caboodle hangs on the quality of the tracking. The really interesting thing here is that when I looked at this carefully I discovered that the way Jeremy had implemented the tracking was nothing like what I had been expecting.

What I had anticipated finding was tracking at the keyword and ad group level. In virtually every campaign tracking discussion I have come across the standard recommendation is that you assign an integer, or a short alphanumeric string, to each keyword in your campaigns, and you pass those values through to the affiliate network.

Not so with Optimize My Site. Instead, Jeremy's approach is not to track keywords directly, but to track the individual visitors that click on your adverts. Since it seems to me that it would never have occurred to me to do it this way, this approach strikes me as pure inspiration. A flash of genius even.

So here, in a nutshell, is how it works. I'll get into more detail later when I explain how you'd go about configuring Optimize My Site for use with your own landing pages.

The first thing you do with Optimize My Site is use it to automatically convert the destination URLs in your pay per click campaigns to tracking URLs that target the OMS tracking script. This way, when someone clicks on one of your ads, they are redirected momentarily to the tracking script which dumps a pile of information about the visitor and campaign into the OMS click database. The visitor is then forwarded immediately to your original landing page. The tracking remains entirely invisible.

A good deal of the information that is logged is already encoded into those tracking URLs that now appear in your PPC campaigns. Information like the campaign, adgroup, and keyword, are stored there. The OMS tracking script also adds information about the source of the click when it dumps information to the click log. When it does this, it assigns a unique ID to that record, and then floats this ID as a cookie. In effect, this is a visitor ID which keys into all the information that has been stored in the click log. It is the visitor ID which gets sent on to the affiliate network as a tracking ID.

Did I mention how smart this is? These tracking, or visitor, IDs are created on the fly by the Optimize My Site software each time a new visitor lands on your pages. When the affiliate network provides commission reports, these include the tracking ID which can be used to retrieve information in your local OMS click log. When that information is retrieved, the adgroup and keyword data can be connected to the adgroup and keyword costs present in your PPC cost reports (provided by Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter). Once you have loaded the reports, Optimize My Site can generate cost/benefit reports that pinpoint exactly how your money is being spent (usually misused) in your ad campaigns.

In short, it's brilliant, and it works exceptionally well.

Incidentally, this form of tracking can be applied to any affiliate network that offers sub ID tracking. Although there is an interface in the application to add new affiliate networks, you probably won't have occasion to use it. Optimize My Site already supports all of the major affiliate networks. Here's a full list so you can search for your favorite:

• Advaliant
• Azoogle
• ClickBank
• Commission Junction
• CX Digital
• Direct Leads
• Hydra Network
• LinkShare
• Market Leverage
• Never Blue Ads
• PepperJam Network
• Performics
• Share a Sale
• Trade Doubler

Future versions of the software will undoubtedly support even more affiliate networks.

If you have never used Optimize My Site before (likely since you are reading this review), you may be wondering how much work is involved on your part, and how difficult it is to configure the application.

Well, there is good news, and there is bad news. But it's mostly good news, so if you are serious about wanting to make more money with pay per click advertising then keep reading.

So let's get started with the good news. Configuring Optimize My Site is really easy. The reason for this is that you are just not given that many options. Fundamentally OMS is designed to take your campaigns, from Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter, and store them internally in a universal format. From there, you can export those campaigns into a new OMS format that rewrites the URLs for your landing pages so that they go through the OMS tracking script named, suitably enough, tracking.php

This process configures your campaigns so that tracking IDs can be added automatically when visitors click on your adverts. If your landing page URLs originally looked something liked this:

  http://mydomain.com/landing.php?id=HP123

then in the exported OMS format the new tracking URLs will look something like this:

  http://mydomain.com/oms_track/tracking.php
   ?utm_source=1
   &utm_campaign=HP
   &utm_landing_page=http%3A%2F%2Fmydomain.com%2Flanding.php%3Fid%3DHP123
   ...

The actual tracking URL will be a good deal longer than this, and carries with it as much information about the campaign as is possible to capture. I imagine the utm_ prefix stands for universal tracking markup or something similar, and represents the universal format used by OMS to characterize campaigns in their entirety.

As you can see, the original landing page URL is encoded into the tracking URL and it is this piece of information that allows the tracking script to redirect to the landing page once it has logged the click event and assigned a tracking ID for the visitor. It is at this stage that this tracking ID is floated as a cookie, so that regardless of where the visitor goes on your site, or which affiliate URL they use to leave your site, the tracking ID can be retrieved and attached to the outgoing affiliate URL.

By the way, you won't find a full discussion of this process in the Optimize My Site user manual. I had to reverse-engineer a little bit of the application to see what was going on. The code itself is obfuscated, in part to discourage people from tinkering with it.

A very convenient feature of this export process is that you can rewrite your campaigns in any of the three supported formats, which are compatible respectively with Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter. This means that you might track your primary campaigns in Google AdWords, and once you have optimized your campaigns for maximum profitability, export them to Yahoo Search Marketing, or MSN AdCenter. Doing so can potentially double or triple your profits.

Besides creating your tracking URLs, the other thing that needs to be done is replace the affiliate URLs in your landing pages with cloaked versions that OMS will generate for you. Optimize My Site supports tracking for all of the popular networks including: Commission Junction, Linkshare, Share a Sale, ClickBank, Trade Doubler, Performics (Google Affiliate Network), and a few others.

By simply pasting your affiliate URL(s) into Optimize My Site one-by-one, equivalent version of the URL(s) will be generated that redirect through the OMS click.php script. This script simply logs the outbound click, grabs the tracking ID that was made available as a cookie when the visitor first appeared on your site, and attaches that tracking ID to your original affiliate URL as the sub ID that the affiliate network uses to perform campaign tracking.

If your original outbound affiliate URLs look something like this:

  http://affiliatenetwork.com/vendor-xyz/?id=123

then the cloaked OMS format for the new outbound URLs will look like this:

  http://mydomain.com/oms_track/click.php?link=1

The OMS link variable here simply tells click.php which link record to look up in the OMS database to find the original affiliate URL that will be used to send the visitor on to their final destination, which is a merchant sales page.

So not only is the replacement of these URLs critical to the implementation of tracking, you also get cloaked affiliate links appearing on your landing pages, making them a good deal less susceptible to link hijacking of any form. Again, this protects your commissions and puts more money in your pocket at the end of the day.

In summary, configuring Optimize My Site is rather straight forward once you understand what is going on behind the scenes.

The ultimate goal of the Optimize My Site software is to enable you to create reports on the performance of your PPC campaigns. Fortunately when you finally get to that stage, after tracking your campaigns for a suitable length of time, you discover that OMS allows you to generate not one, but nine different types of report. In effect, you can view campaign performance through a nine-sided prism to get the best possible picture of what is going on.

Here is a list of the report titles and a brief explanation of what they contain:

• Commission By Date - Shows transactions (by date) that resulted in a commission, and includes information such as the campaign and ad group, as well as the merchant, sales commission, and referer information.
  
  
• Commission By Sub ID - Similar to the Commission By Date report but also includes keyword information in line-by-line transactions.
  
  
• Commission By Sub ID Summary - Takes the information from Commission By Sub ID and groups by keyword. The summary includes raw keyword used by visitor, the keyword you bid upon, and the total commission earned by the keyword.
  
  
• Ad Groups ROI - When you have ad groups that contain a large number of keywords, or your long-tail keyword results are statistically insignificant taken in isolation, grouping the results by ad group provides at least some understanding of ad group performance taken as a whole.
  
  
• Keywords ROI - Get the number of impressions, clicks, cost, commissions, and net profit for each keyword.
  
  
• Keyword Costs By Date - Learn how much you spend on each keyword, for a given period, for each of the PPC services you are using.
  
  
• Keyword Costs By Date Summary - Get the total keyword spend summed across all of the PPC services.
  
  
• Site Visits - See information about each visitor coming into your site, so that you can better understand your audience and where they are coming from.
  
  
• Outbound Clicks - Find out who exactly is clicking through to your affiliate offers. Includes time, page, ad group, keyword data.

Not all of these reports are going to be of use to you, of course. Some will be revelant for some campaigns, and not others. But the reports that you will spend the most time looking at include the Commission By Sub ID Summary, Keywords ROI, and Ad Groups ROI reports.

The power of these reports is revealed as you study them and find that, often, only a few long-tail keywords are responsible for the bulk of your sales, they are not the ones you had expected to be the earners, and that almost every other keyword is costing you money and not even resulting in any clicks through to merchant sales pages.

A nice addition to analytics, beginning from version 2.1 is the ability to track to the level of individual ads. Now you can not only which ads are being clicked on, but you can discern which ads are actually making you sales.

It is exactly this information that allows you to cull useless keywords and ads, reorganize your keyword bidding on those keywords and ads that remain, and bring your campaign into profitability. The day you apply this x-ray vision to your campaigns is the day you realize that, until that point, you had been running blind in you pay per click marketing efforts.

Optimize My Site works because it takes the guesswork out of PPC marketing and allows you to see exactly what is working in your campaigns, and what is not.

a page from the user manual

Almost all but the most trivial software is essentially opaque to its users unless it comes with great documentation. The Optimize My Site user manual is roughly 100 pages in length and comes in the form of a PDF file. Fortunately this was written long before Jeremy got around to creating any video tutorial on how to use his product. Because of this the OMS user manual is very detailed, and full of screenshots.

On the other hand, if you are anything like me, you'll find the first reading of this material hard-going. The main reason for this, I think, is that each fundamental procedure is presented first for Google AdWords campaigns, then again for Yahoo Search Marketing, and finally for MSN AdCenter. Unfortunately this is necessary because the reporting interface for each of the PPC services is different, and has to be handled slightly differently in each case. So you are seeing an involved operation repeated three times. Unfortunately this cannot be avoided if the coverage is to be comprehensive, which it is. Still, on first reading, it is dizzying.

a screenshot from the video tutorial

For those who don't like reading manuals, and prefer to be shown what to do, there is now contextual video help files built into the application. If you aren't sure about the next step in your optimization tasks, look for the little video icon in the upper right part of the web page. In total, the Optimize My Site video tutoring amounts to about an hour of material covering essentially the same information that is presented in the user manual.

So you will probably find it easier to simply start with the videos as the occasion arises when you need some guidance, and then use the manual as reference. Personally I find the video sessions more useful. Jeremy tells you exactly what he is doing, and why, in each step, although it may seem like he is rushing through the process at times, so you may find yourself hitting that pause and repeat button again and again as you try to keep up.

On the whole, though, the documentation for Optimize My Site is excellent.

I'm not always convinced by video testimonials that promote products, but here are a couple of unsolicited testimonials for Optimize My Site that I found on YouTube. Clearly these guys are complete amateurs when it comes to putting together great videos. But their testimonies ring true.

It should be apparent at this stage that I am impressed with Optimize My Site. As a software developer I am always wary of building an application around the interfaces of independent services that could up and change their behavior any day and force a rewrite of my software. Unfortunately if you are going to build pay per click campaign optimizing software, you really don't have any choice but to do exactly that.

In this case, Jeremy's software must export data to the three major PPC services, and it must import from them. It also has to be able to import commission reports from all the major affiliate networks. So Jeremy really has to remain on his toes.

This points up one of the major benefits of having software for affiliates that is created by none other than a super affiliate, because Jeremy relies on his software to run his daily pay per click business. He has a vested interest in making sure it works as advertised. For this reason I am confident that Optimize My Site won't become an outdated, or even non-functioning, piece of software as the pay per click industry evolves.

The only major improvement to this software that I would really love to see is more in the way of automation. Currently commission reports are manually scraped from the pages of the affiliate networks and pasted into Optimize My Site. Likewise cost reports from the PPC services are pasted in. It is possible to imagine these reports being retrieved automatically by the software on a scheduled basis and the cost/benefit reports automatically generated so that they are ready when you login daily to see where you are at. However, the logistics for this are not at all trivial and I would not expect to see such a development any time soon. It is nice to think about it though :)

In the far future I can envision descendents of Optimize My Site type software that set up campaigns automatically, track the conversions, and then either cull keywords and ad groups, or adjust their bids automatically for optimum conversions. All automatically, without any intervention from the software administrator.

Well, we are a long way from that scenario. In the meantime though, Optimize My Site does about as good a job as you can expect of software today.

If you are still wondering whether it is worth your time and money to download and install Optimize My Site then I want to make the decision just a little easier for you.

If you go ahead now and order Optimize My Site, using this link or any other on this page, I'll throw in the following two products of mine, free of charge:

	My Optimize My Site Bonus Products For You - Absolutely FREE Launch Your Own Affiliate Review Site Monopoly $67 FREE while this offer lasts. Have you ever wondered what it takes to run a profitable affiliate review site? Most affiliates have little idea what they are doing when they create their first product review site. In this 120 page report I'll show you what the possibilities are and how you go about creating sites that sell. This is a MUST READ for affiliates. Review Site Software $297 FREE while this offer lasts. One of the most profitable affiliate review site models is the mini-review site that reviews a handful of top products from a popular niche. Using this little gem of a tool that I designed just for this purpose, you'll be able to create a mini-review site in a matter of minutes, then customize it to the specifications of your niche. No affiliate should be with out this tool! Here's what you'll get with Review Site:   An attractive home page that sets a tone of authority for your niche and includes a list-building form built in which dispenses downloadable gifts:   Product comparison pages that offer immediate at-a-glance summaries of your recommended products - all automatically tabulated and formatted for easy viewing:   Professionally formatted product reviews that include pros, cons, and an overall rating (you can even add your own fields):   Articles pages that are attractively formatted and SEO optimized for increased traffic and search engine ranking:   You can even integrate a WordPress blog in the same style as the rest of your pages: Once you have purchased Optimize My Site you'll automatically receive an email from me (within a few hours of your purchase) with download instructions for your bonus products. If for any reason you haven't received that email by the end of today, simply use the Contact link at the top of this page to send me your ClickBank receipt for Optimize My Site and I'll fix you up with links for those bonuses. To Your PPC Success,