Tag Archives: tracking202

New Tracking202 Is Coming

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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”.

New 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

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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!

Testing Offers 101: From Red to Green

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One of the toughest ongoing questions for affiliate marketers is, “How do I know when I’ve spent enough money testing an offer?”  Everybody has a different approach. There are a couple of truths that we need to look at.

  1. It is very rare to find a campaign that is profitable right out of the gate. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, because it does, but it is very rare. In most cases you will need to test, optimize, test, optimize, then test some more before you really get it dialed in and profiting enough to make it worthwhile.
  2. Some campaigns will not work no matter how much testing and optimizing you do. There is nothing more frustrating than beating a dead horse.

Sound like a Catch 22? It all boils down to your tolerance for pain, or your willingness to lose (or I like to say “invest”) money in a campaign before it sees a profit. How do you test properly without blowing too much money, and still avoid dropping potentially profitable campaigns too early? Here’s what I like to do…

First of all, when you setup a campaign, you want to spend about 2x to 3x the payout of the offer for the initial test. If the offer payout is $5, then you want to spend approximately $10 – $15 on the initial test phase. This is the “gathering data” phase.

Stats

Green is good

Once you have done this, you will have some data to work with (assuming you’ve been tracking everything, with Tracking202 or a similar program). Here’s the type of questions you want to ask in order to evaluate your data:

Did it get any conversions at all? If so, what keywords / urls / referrers / ad copies / banners were they from? Did you make a profit? Would it be profitable if you bid on less keywords? Would it be profitable if you bid on more keywords for a cheaper price? The list goes on, but these questions should give you a start.

For me personally, after the initial testing phase, if I haven’t received any conversions at all, I usually dump the campaign. That’s -100% ROI, and that’s going to be hard to overcome without a drastically different strategy, and it’s probably not worth it. If you are anywhere from -50% ROI to 0% ROI, then you might be able to profit with optimization. Try using a landing page or direct linking (whichever you didn’t do the first time), try different ad copies, pictures, headlines, calls to action, etc. Use the data from the test to see what is working and what is not working.

However you got those conversions in the testing phase, focus on that precise set of circumstances and recreate them in greater volume. Once you understand how and why you got some conversions, you are well on your way to having an optimized and profitable campaign.

Now go make some money!

Thoughts on Tracking202

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There have been plenty of posts about the re-acquisition of Tracking202 by Wes Mahler and Steven Truong, so I’m not going to rehash those here.  All the buzz and discussion about this topic, as well as the original sale to Bloosky, have made me think quite a bit about what was the cause of all this.

Fact is, there would never have been a sale to Bloosky or a re-acquisition in the first place if Wes & Steven hadn’t poured out their sweat and their wallets to create a truly original product.  Although there are competitors now, when 202 came out it was the first of its kind on the block.  They were able to capture almost the entire market for the affiliate tracking software niche with little trouble or competition.

Marketers can take this to heart the next time they are getting frustrated by the arbitrage game.  There is much more out there to making money online than buying traffic from someone and selling it to someone else for more money.  The true innovators in the online space (and in the business world in general) are the people who offered a solution for the needs of their clients in a new (or just better) way.

When you create your own product to promote, you are in control.  There are no advertisers to scrub leads or networks to withhold payment, you are the be-all and end-all of your online empire.  Granted, this is much easier said than done, but the rewards are evident everywhere you look.

Just look at Marcus from Plenty of Fish.  He now has Match.com demanding to know how POF gets more new users every month than they could dream of, and they’ve got huge funding behind them.  Markus Frind started POF all on his own, and kept it simple, and believed in it.  Now they are a force to be reckoned with in the dating industry.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: you have ideas all the time.  You know, the ones that get scribbled down on a piece or paper or just mentally filed back there in your brain with all the other things that will never come to fruition.  Take some time to develop these ideas.  They don’t have to be perfect when you start out, they just need to exist.  You can fine-tune things later.

If you create something that will be a long term asset today, you will be glad for it tomorrow when the next big affiliate industry shake up comes along.  Trust me.

The Top 5 Prosper202 Hacks & Mods

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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.

Ad-Tech SF 2010: I Can Has Traffics?

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As I walked through the Exhibit Hall of Moscone Center West for Ad-Tech San Francisco 2010, I got the feeling that I was one of many.  Many affiliates and advertisers that have been scorned by Google and, most recently, Facebook.  Many people that were looking for the next big thing, or even better, the traffic source with killer ROI that nobody knows about.  You probably won’t hear a lot of people blogging or tweeting about what they found, but based on my experience I would say that most people got their money’s worth.  Especially if they knew what they were looking for.

For me, the real value was in the three events that I attended on Tuesday. First was the AffBuzz meetup at ‘Wichcraft, an excellent sandwich shop just a couple blocks from the convention center.  This was a great event because there was nobody sponsoring it, it was just affiliates and bloggers chilling and talking shop over lunch (that we paid for ourselves). I hope Justin decides to continue the meetup at future shows.

The second event was the Meetup202 event put on by Bloosky / Tracking202.  Say what you will about Bloosky and their nefarious schemes to make money off the of 202 users, they do know how to throw a good event.  I’m not just saying that because I walked away with a free iPad either, although it rocks (I’m sure I’ll post about that later).  All of the Meetup202 events I have been to at conferences have been the highlight.  I would travel just to go to the meetup, because the caliber of the people there is second to none.

I got to chat with Jon Shugart, the creator of Keyword Rockstar.  He’s a cool guy, really sharp and excited about his product.  I use it myself and I would definitely recommend checking it out. I’ve been meaning to do a review, maybe I’ll get around to it next month.

Finally, the PPC.bz / EWA Network party was definitely real.  They chose to have it at a full on concert venue instead of the typical tiny club or packed out hotel suite.  I personally liked this approach, as it gave everyone a little bit more room to spread out, mix, and mingle.

There wasn’t really anything spectacular or memorable that stuck out to me about the Exhibit Hall.  However, I did leave with the feeling that this was a good show and that I am going to make more money because of it.  And that’s all these things are really about, right?

Tracking Your PPV Campaigns With Prosper202

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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:

JAH Simple PPC

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.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5