Edit 12/21/2010: The information in this post is outdated.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.
Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5
Keep up the great posts. I've been running ppv traffic for a few weeks and have yet to track (typically direct linking.) Perhaps I'll have to start tracking.
Hi, you no longer need to do this you described above. Prosper202 now has build in support for MediaTraffic and Zango and shows you the keywords if you activate to pass through the keywords.
Thanks for the update! You can still use this method for the other 3 PPV networks, until they come up with a similar solution.
Pingback: Scaling Campaigns With PPV | Inside Affiliate
Josh,
Thank thank you for the helpful information – I understand how to do it on Zango now.
I still don;t have the faintest idea on how to do the 202 tracking on TrafficVance.
Any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated.
@killerboy I am new to prosper202 where and how do you setup it up for zango.
I only see options to add PPC(Google, Yahoo) you know the big 3 but I dont see an option for Zango or any of the others
I love this site, typed in google: direct linking adwords 2009.
as a member of both GCD and PPCclassroom I have learnt more in 1hr
than months in the other 2, they string you along because it's a membership site. google must hate me, they have given me a red
backside 5 times now, (google slap) trying to direct link,but now I'll try
what i have learnt from this site. I'LL BE BACK!! regards Gavin Wills
125 Pacific Highway Jones Island NSW Australia 2430
Pingback: PPV Marketing - The latest hot trend!
Great idea! Some of these CPM anad PPV networks really need to improve their passing of referral data too! Some are ok but definitely not 100% effective or accurate.
For TVance, can I just add &t202kw=%%$KEYWORD%%?
Anybody get this to work with Clickstor?
Don't waste your time with Clicksor, their traffic sucks (for the most part). Use Media Traffic, Lead Impact, or DirectCPV to get started.
P202 is good but one problem I faced is that everytime I am being outbidded in MT, I have to update my new tracking p202 URL with the new bid into MT again.
Anyone has a better solution to this?
Melvin
All you have to do is go to the Update tab in P202 and then click "Update CPC Costs". You can do this each day and update the actual click/view costs for the previous day. If you can't find a report with the average CPV for the day, just take the total spent for yesterday at MT and divide it by the number of views you received.
Thanks Josh.
Let me paint a scenario. I have 1000 targets in MT. Each target cpv cost differs. Some maybe 0.015, some may be 0.025 and so on as I am being outbidded. I can either match the competing CPV or I can outbid all of them by placing 0.03 for all my targets. In this case, my P202 tracking url CPV has to be updated as 0.03 and that tracking url has to be reuploaded to MT as my new targets url. Thats why I asked the initial question.
Yes I understand your scenario perfectly. What I am telling you is that you don't need to create new links every time you update your bid. Just continue using the first link that you created, and then update the click costs through the Update tab each day as detailed above.
ic..ok thanks a lot Josh. Appreciate your time taken to reply to my comment.
anyone know how to get prosper202 working with directcpv? do i have to separate urls and keywords and the url would like like whats below?
yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=4459&t202kw={{vurl}}
dave
is there any more tracking 202 hacks around for ppv and were can i get them
What type of hack were you looking for? Tracking 202 works fine for PPV the way it is as long as it's on a good server (VPS or Dedicated).
Hello Josh,
I created MySQL database but I am not very experienced in this, so I would like to ask you how many fields I should create in my database.
I have only created 2: "id" and "name" but I am not sure if it is right.
Help will be much appreciated
Wald
When you install Prosper202 it will create all the tables and fields for you in the database. All you have to do is create the database, and then you enter the DB name, username and password into the 202-config.php file. It will do the rest when you follow the installation instructions.