This is a pretty obvious technique, but it might help some people starting out.

Sometimes you want to quickly test out a new niche by direct linking, and don’t want to go through all the trouble of setting up your tracking system, placing pixels etc. But you still want to be able to see which keywords convert. So here’s the quick and dirty method.

Just drop each keyword into its own adgroup, and for the ad in that adgroup assign a unique sequential sub id to the destination URL. That’s it. Since each keyword will trigger a unique ad and sub id, when it converts you can see which keyword converted. This takes less that a minute to set up in the Adwords editor. You can also use destination URLs for each keyword with them in the same adgroup, but I like the separate adgroup method.

Once you have tested the niche and want to move forward then you can set up your full keyword and conversion tracking. But you can’t beat the quick method for small scale tests.