New Tracking202 Is Coming

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Josh Todd

The news was dropped today by the legendary Nana Gilbert-Baffoe that a new version of Tracking202 / Prosper202 is on the horizon. I’ve been wondering when they would fire back with something new to answer all the new tracking systems released this year (primarily Bevo Media and CPV Lab). I don’t have any details about what new changes version 2.0 of 202 is going to include, but according to the beta signup website, it will be “a game-changing totally re-engineered version of Tracking202”.

My interest is definitely piqued. Sign up for the beta here if you want to check it out before the general public gets to see it.

UPDATE

Once I confirmed my email for the beta they gave a couple more teasers about functionality:

Unparalleled Flexibility – Track everything in ways not yet available on any of the tracking systems in the market.
Lightning Fast Redirects – We all know slow redirects cost you money and conversions, so we’ve optimized the new Tracking202 to serve up redirects in the blink of an eye
Fully Open and Expandable – We built this from the ground up to allow you to modify and customize the software via the powerful API we expose
Enhanced Workflow – You shouldn’t have to spend hours setting up your links, and with our new enhanced workflow, you won’t have to. We’re talking bulk uploads and automation galore!
There’s more to share – Like the new robust offer rotator, impression pixels, path analysis, enhanced reporting, tons more data points tracked so you can slice and dice things just the way you like it, and the list goes on!

Another Bevo Media Post

Posted on August 11, 2010 by Josh Todd

In case you haven’t seen all the posts lately (like this one and this one) about Bevo Media, it is now publicly launched and ready for action. It is a tracking platform for paid traffic, along the lines of Prosper202. It does have a lot of nifty features that 202 doesn’t have, and they are putting some serious marketing muscle behind this release to make it a major player in the PPC / PPV / Media Buy tracking & analytics field.

Bevo Media was designed by Ryan Bukevicz and a team of programmers, and the finished product is definitely quite polished. The interface is quite visually striking. But looks aside, there are several things that set it apart from 202 and other competitors. First of all, it has built-in support for the top CPA affiliate networks. You just enter your login details and it will automatically pull the stats for you. This is a massive time saver! It also has built-in API support for the big 3 PPC engines. This means that it will pull your click costs automatically as well. That means no more logging in to your networks and search engines 10 times a day. Bevo Media becomes your hub for everything.

Another cool feature that I’ve never seen before in a tracking system is the Classroom. It has different articles, videos, and tools to help the newbie affiliate get their feet wet and make some money. If you are already a successful affiliate, there’s probably nothing in here that will be new to you. But if you are just starting out it’s definitely worth a look.

They have both an online hosted version (like Tracking202.com), and they also have an open source self-hosted version (like Prosper202). They both look the same, and if you opt for the self-hosted version they have a very nifty tool that will automatically install and configure it on a Rackspace Cloud server for you. For people that have never installed anything on web server before, this is a godsend.

So is Bevo Media better than Prosper202? Ultimately that decision is going to be up to you. 202 has a lot of diehard fans, and it’s become the industry standard over the last couple of years. That being said, I think for people running PPC traffic from the big 3 search engines, this is going to give them a huge advantage over the standard Prosper202 installation. It’s more on par with Tracking 202 Pro, only it’s free. Definitely give it a shot if you’ve got some time to test it out, and let me know what you think of it in the comments!

Linkshiftr – Like Bit.ly With Brains

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Josh Todd

URL Shorteners have become ubiquitous in today’s social-media-crazed internet world. Marketers have even begun using services such as bit.ly to cloak their affiliate links and make them more attractive. I recently discovered a new service that is actually directed at marketers, it’s called Linkshiftr. It has a pretty cool set of tools that you can use to experiment with your links, almost like a Prosper202 lite. Here are some of the features:

Variable Passing – You can pass variables dynamically to your destination URLs. This will be just the ticket for marketers looking to add SubIDs or dynamic PHP variables (like keywords) onto their links. You can pass as many variables as you would like.
Weighted Link Rotator – This is something that PPV marketers especially will like. You can add multiple URLs, and then choose how you want to have them rotated. For example, if you want Offer A to be shown 70% of the time, Offer B to be shown 20% of the time, and Offer C to be shown 10% of the time, this can handle it for you in a breeze.
Conversion Tracking – Here is where Linkshiftr really sets itself apart from the competition. Services like bit.ly allow you to see how many clicks your links have gotten, but to my knowledge only Linkshiftr lets you place a pixel and do conversion tracking. This could be extremely useful for marketers that are just setting up a quick and dirty campaign to test an offer before going into Prosper202, creating a landing page and a full blown campaign.

You can try out Linkshiftr for free by signing up for an account here, but if you want to use the Conversion Tracking feature you will have to sign up for a Pro account for $9.99 per month. The free account has all the other features though, so it’s definitely still useful.

Has anybody else tried this out yet? What are your thoughts?

The Top 5 Prosper202 Hacks & Mods

Posted on May 10, 2010 by Josh Todd

Almost every affiliate that I know (who is worth his salt) uses Prosper202 for their tracking. For the uninitiated, it is the open source version of Tracking202. Open source means that everyone is free to poke around in the code and mod or hack it to work better for their specific instance. Also it means that you keeep all your data on your server and host the installation yourself. Since the release of Prosper202 there have been a few nifty hacks that have been released on various blogs, and they are a pain to track down so I thought I’d compile my favorite 5 mods here.

1. Adding New Traffic Source Icons To Prosper 202

This one comes from the Masterless Samurai himself, Wes. It’s a fairly simple mod, but extremely useful. The original P202 install only has a few Traffic Sources (PPC networks) built in. Now that affiliates are using P202 to track almost every traffic source imaginable, you will want to add the new icons in so you can see at a glance which accounts you are looking at in the Overview report. If there’s no icon, it just appears as a question mark. It’s nice to be able to add newer traffic sources like Plenty Of Fish, etc.

2. Redirect Prosper202 To Any Tab

This is one of two mods on this list by Jasper, aka Nerdy Affiliate. This one is also simple in nature but a big time saver. When you go to check your stats, it takes 3-4 steps for you to get to the information you want. With this mod, you can set it up to go straight to the reporting page that you want when you go to your tracking domain. Very handy.

3. Prosper202 LP Click-Through for Text Ads & Keywords Mod

This one is also from Nerdy Affiliate. It is a pretty deep mod that adds an additional layer of statistics that you can track: the landing page click-through rate on an individual keyword or text ad basis. This is used to compare the effectiveness of each keyword or text ad by seeing which ones generate the highest click-through rate from your landing page to the offer page. Without this mod, you are only able to tell the overall landing page click-through percentage for all keywords combined.

4. Prosper202 Offer Rotation Setup

This one is by AdHustler, and it’s not an actual hack to the software. It is just a different mindset for using the offer rotation feature in P202. This doesn’t take any coding to setup, just simply follow the instructions on the linked post and you will see how effective it can be for split testing offers to make sure you are getting the most money for your traffic.

5. Prosper202 Complete Install Package for Hostgator

Hostgator is one of the most popular web hosting companies our there. Because of this, more than a few people have tried to install Prosper202 on their Hostgator account and run into a nasty error. The guys at BlueLayerMedia have created an all-in-one fix and install package for version 1.3.2 of P202 that will get you up and running on your Hostgator account quicker than you can say “make monies online”.

If you’ve got a sweet hack that I didn’t list here, let me know in the comments and share the wealth! The open source nature of P202 and its users is what makes the software so essential.

PPV Network Review: DirectCPV

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Josh Todd

If you’ve read my other posts on PPV, you know I’m a fan of Media Traffic and their PPV network. This is the place that 90% of the people I talk to start out with PPV. That being said, there are other options out there. A newer network that I heard about recently is DirectCPV. Since I had a few people asking me about it, I decided to give it a test run to see how it stacks up to the other guys.

First of all, the interface may look familiar to you when you log in and setup a campaign. This is due to the fact that DirectCPV is white labeling the CPView platform. This does not mean that DirectCPV is the same thing as CPView, they have a different user base with the adware installed so it is a completely different network.

It is relatively simple to get a campaign set up with the interface, you put in your Landing Page url (affiliate link), give it a name, and then you add in at least one type of targeting (URL, keyword, or category). I put in about 20 URLs from a quick Google search and decided to try out a couple keywords as well. One thing to note here is that DirectCPV does not have anywhere near the number of adware users that some of the bigger networks have, so you might be a bit safer testing out new keywords here (keywords on the big networks can mean your whole budget gone in the blink of an eye).

I let it run for a few days and when I came back to check my stats (using Prosper202) I was pleasantly surprised that my campaign was profitable right off the bat. It wasn’t a home run, but it did make money. I decided to make a couple of minor tweaks at that point. The first thing was checkout my Prosper202 to see what URLs were converting. As is often the case, all the conversions were coming from one URL. I noticed that some of them were coming from the Keyword that I had put in instead of the direct URL. The problem with that is that the bid price for the Keyword was 0.08 (8 cents) and the bid for the direct URL was 0.01 (1 cent). Simple fix there, I paused the Keyword and added the URL to my targeting. After that the profits were decent.

The main gripe I have about the DirectCPV interface is that you have to click “Check Bid” on each URL individually to see if you are in 1st position. Other networks have done this better, but you can take some of the hassle out of it by setting the bid mode to Auto and then setting it at 1st position. This will automatically increase your bid if somebody is above you. Also if you want to Geo Target your campaign, you have to do it after the campaign is setup, you can’t do it during the campaign creation. This stumped me the first time.

Final word? I like DirectCPV. I think it’s worth a shot especially if you have a profitable campaign on another network that you are looking to expand. It can also be good for testing out a new campaign to if it converts without blowing your budget since there is a smaller installed user base, there is less competition, and the bid prices start at 1 penny (at MT it is 1.5). It doesn’t have as much traffic as the bigger guys, but from what I saw it can definitely be a good source to add to your repertoire.

If you signup through my affiliate link here you can get a $25 credit by using the promo code “BR25”.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5

Tracking Your PPV Campaigns With Prosper202

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Josh Todd

Edit 12/21/2010: The information in this post is outdated. For an up-to-date and complete guide to setting up your PPV campaigns with Prosper202, download my free eBook, “PPV 101”.

Edit 07/27/2009: Prosper202 has added native support for Media Traffic, so this method is no longer necessary to run with MT. Feel free to use it for other networks that don”t yet work correctly with P202.

First off, let me say that I am a huge fan of Prosper202. Whether you use the self-hosted Prosper202 version (my preference) or the online Tracking202 version, this is one of the greatest tools to come along in affiliate marketing in a long time. Although it was designed primarily as a PPC tool, as PPV is gaining more favor with affiliates it is becoming more and more essential to track which URLs are converting for them.

The tricky part is deciding what is the best way to setup a campaign with a PPV network using P202. With PPC, using the Big 3 Search Engines, you can use the dynamic keyword insertion function to make it easy. Zango and Media Traffic do have a form of pass-through, but I haven””t been able to get it to work correctly with P202 because it passes extra variables along with your keyword/URL.

The method that I use may seem cumbersome, but it””s actually not too bad with a couple of free tools. What I do is create a unique destination URL for each URL that I am targeting on the PPV network. By doing this, I can make sure that the keyword/URL info is precisely as I want it to be displayed in P202. When you setup your campaigns on P202, it will give you a link like this:

yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=4459&t202kw=

You will need to add the URL or keyword that you are tracking at the end of the URL after “t202kw=”. You can do this manually, which can take quite a while if you are doing 1,000+ URLs at once, or you can make it easy.

First, download John Hasson””s JAH Simple PPC tool. It is a very handy little program, and it looks like this:

It is designed for creating a large number of long tail keywords with just a couple of clicks, but we are going to use it to create our destination URLs. Just take your P202 link and put it in List A in JAH Simple PPC. Then, take your list of URLs that you are targeting and put it in List B, then hit Generate Keyword Combinations. Now that we have our list, we need to get them uploaded to the PPV network.

With Media Traffic, you will want to download their Bulk Upload Form. Once you have the form, just hit Copy Final KW List To Clipboard in JAH and then paste it into the Destination column in the MT form. Next, copy the list of URLs that you used in List B (JAH) to generate your tracking links, and paste that into both the Name column and the Target column in the MT form. The Name is just an internal reference for MT, so I use the URL as the name. Next you set your bid price (just do the first couple then copy it down to all of them with Excel).

Once that is all set, you upload it into your new campaign at Media Traffic, and you are good to go! If you are using Zango, you will need to use their Bulk Upload Form. Be sure to bookmark this link, because there is no way to get there directly from the Zango interface.

Now that you can track your URLs, it’s time to make some money.