I tried writing my own tracking script so that I could track keywords to the conversion level for affiliate products. It worked pretty well, but I found one flaw due to the fact that Google doesn’t always seem to set the cookie.

So instead I decided to find software that was already out there to do tracking.

I found something called Prosper202. It is free, open source that runs on your own host. (They also make a version called Tracker202 which is hosted by them).

Here is my experience:

Installing
I downloaded the zip file and installed it per the instructions. You have to know a little bit about how to get around your cpanel on your webhost. You must create your own database and user, but that’s ok. No biggle.

The instructions said that once it is installed, you just have to go to the installation domain and be prompted for the database and user you had created. This didn’t happen for me. Instead I got an error that it couldn’t find 202-config file. When I looked at the files that were there, I found that 202-config-sample, so I looked inside it.

It had ‘put your database name here,’ ‘put your username here’ etc. When I filled in this info and saved the file as 202-config, everything else worked as it was supposed to.

Getting Started
So I logged in and then stared at the main screen. I felt like an idiot because I couldn’t see any choices of what to do. So I tried to run the video tutorial, but instead of using one of the standard video players, it wanted me to download another one. I started to and then bagged it and went to the text tutorial.

The instructions didn’t match what I was staring at. They said to click on Step 1 and then do such and such, but I didn’t see anything like that.

I finally realized that I needed to click on Tracking202 first. Now, if you’re not aware that their hosted version of this product is called Tracking202, you’d never know to do this. But since this is probably the same splash page they use for that, it makes sense in hindsight.

Setting up a Campaign
As I clicked through the steps and followed their help text, I found the interface to be very simple and easy to understand. Well, except for one thing. When you enter the destination url, it says something like “you have to understand how subids work on your affiliate network or this won’t work.” Now I understand how subids work, but I didn’t quite see how to relate this to the destination url. I think they need to be a little more explicit or give an example. It turns out you need to add it yourself to the end, such as:
http://destination.com?tid=

But other than that, the instructions were pretty clear.


The Basics
So here’s what the software does. You enter in information about your campaign just for reporting purposes, such as campaign name, ad name, etc. Then the software assigns a unique id to that combination and gives you tracking code that looks something like this:
http://www.tracking.internetmarketingkultch.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=851&t202kw=

‘tracking’ is the subdomain I set up (it isn’t really; it’s just for this illustration).
851 is the unique id that the software assigned to that campaign/ad combination
Note that the link ends with ‘kw=’

Now what you need to do is use this as your destination within GoogleAdwords, for example, and add their dynamic keyword code to the end, like this:
http://www.tracking.internetmarketingkultch.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=851&t202kw={keyword}

So now when someone clicks on your link, it will go through the tracking202 software first and will pass it the searched keyword and the unique id. The software logs this entry and then forwards them onto the destination url.

Then to relate your campaign to sales, you copy/paste just the subid number from your affiliate network stats like Clickbank.

Sending the Visitor to Your Website
If you want to have the destination be your website instead of a direct link to an affiliate site, you do two things: 1. Make the destination url be: http://www.mysite.com?
The software will tag “t202id=” and the unique id onto the end of the link. 2. Put the code they supply for a postback pixel onto your thank you page.

Sending the Visitor to Your Website and then onto an Affililate Site
This is a little more tricky, but not that difficult. Again you send the user to your site with ? at the end, like:
http://www.mysite.com?tracking.php?
which means the software will add ‘?t202id=’ and the unique number to the end. Then you have to use php to grab the t202id value from the url and pass it along to your affiliate network as their subid. But since I was already doing something like this in my own tracking script, it shouldn’t be hard to modify it slightly.

Reporting
From the little I’ve seen, the reporting is pretty cool. Check out the screen shot below. You’ll notice that it shows you at a glance what the visitor searched for, what browser was used, etc. One thing to notice is the column right before the ip column. This represents filtered clicks vs. real clicks.

According to the forum, "Real clicks (green) are clicks that you get charged for. Filter clicks (red) are clicks that you’re not suppose to get charged for. Examples of filter clicks include google bots, yahoo bots, etc crawling your ad. Other filter clicks include repeat IP addresses that click on your ad more than once within a certain time range because Google does not charge you for additional clicks by the same IP within a specific time range…"

This can provide powerful information. If you look at my example below, you can see that the same ip address clicked 6 times and another clicked 8 times. This could imply that someone is comparison shopping on the Google ads. It’s definitely good information that I haven’t seen anywhere else, like in Google Analytics.

Problems
There are a couple of problems I see with this tool.

1. One of the pieces of information it asks for is the max cpc. But the software doesn’t save this info by keyword, only by campaign. Most people have different bids per keyword, so this information is useless.
2. The other thing it asks you for is amount of the sale. But if you’re sending people to a site where they can buy different products for different prices, again this is useless. It would be much better if they let you copy/paste the subid AND the commission from your affiliate network.
3. Since you never actually enter your keywords into this tool, you have no way of comparing what the person actually searched for with the keyword of your campaign. For example, you might have this in your campaign: “red widgets” but someone might search for “what exactly are red widgets” and see your ad. It’s too bad they don’t have the option of importing your keyword list.
4. The keyword tracking depends on you adding a dynamic keyword onto the end of the destination url in your ad. But not every search engine may support this. (The big three all do; Google, Yahoo, and MSN.)
5. It asks for your affiliate url at the campaign level. But Google Adwords (and I assume the others) lets you put in a destination url at the ad level. You could have two different ads in Google going to two different landing pages, but you can’t specify that with this tool.

With that said, as long as I can download the unique id plus the keyword, then I can import that and my affiliate network commission information into another tool like MSAccess for analysis.

Summary
For a freebie tool, I have no complaints. It saved me a lot of time writing something like this myself. But you still need another tool to do in-depth analysis, especially if you use different bid prices for different keywords. I would also rather have a tool that lets me input keywords to start with and then assigns them a number rather than depend on using a dynamic keyword in the ad.

Posted by susb8383 under Recommended Products | No Comments »

If you’re like me, you have multiple websites that you log into. We have a few different bank accounts (business, personal savings, personal checking, online personal checking with a higher interest rate, and an old personal checking that I never bothered closing).

I also have multiple affiliate network accounts, credit card accounts, and then random sites like the library catalog, paypal, ebay, my mortgage company, phone, electric, not to mention my webhosts and blog admins.

Wow, I just counted how many links to some kind of login page I have on my home page. There are 53!

In the past, I’m embarrassed to say I’ve used the same password for all of them. I know for security reasons, I should be using a different one for each. But 53 passwords is a lot to remember.

Aha! For Christmas, my dad gave us a subscription to Consumer Reports. A recent issue was all about online security, and through it I found there’s software that will manage all my passwords called RoboForm.