Jason Woods

Last month I wrote about my frustration and disappointment with Tracking202 and I must admit that I might have been a tad too hard on Wes Mahler and the folks at Tracking202. My main gripe is that you can’t always expect 100% up time when using a hosted service. This brings up a very interesting point. Can you expect 100% up time when you host yourself? The answer is no. Both scenarios have their good and bad.  For me, it’s all about control. I don’t want to be reliant on someone else and if there is someone to blame I want that person to be me.

Prosper 202

I truly love the interface that Tracking202 provided and I totally believe Wes and his team built an excellent PPC performance tracking solution. That’s why I decided to install Prosper202 on my own server. The installation was a snap. I only had to create a MySQL database, FTP the files to my server, and run the quick installation script. It’s really that simple. Once you have the application running you just have to set your campaigns up and start sending traffic to the tracking URLs. I purchased a separate domain just for my Prosper202 installation. My thinking behind this is that I will have many different campaigns running and I don’t want to install Prosper202 more than once. Besides, who wants to send niche traffic to tracking URLs in a different niche. It gets confusing.

What I Love About Prosper 202

If you’ve never used a PPC tracking tool to monitor the performance of your PPC campaigns you need to seriously consider it. I don’t know how you can possibly know how well your campaigns are doing without it. Some of my favorite features Prosper202 offers are:

• Clean and Simple Interface
• Easy installation
• Support for numerous PPC and affiliate networks
• Built in sub ID tracking
• Fantastic reporting!!!! (you can’t beat it)
• Built in pixel and post back tracking (I love this feature)

These are just a few of the many features offered by both Tracking202 and Prosper202. One of the newest features that really excites me is the pixel tracking offered. Before I go into detail about pixel tracking you need to know how your stats got updated before this feature was offered. Every click that comes through your Prosper202 or Tracking202 campaign is assigned a unique sub ID. When a conversion takes place on the affiliate network the sub ID is recorded with it. Previously you had to download a report from your affiliate network and then paste all the sub IDs that had conversions into Prosper202 or Tracking202. This is how the application knew which clicks converted. With pixel tracking you have your affiliate network place a tiny bit of HTML that Prosper202 generates on the conversion page. With Azoogle you can have multiple pixels per offer. So I like to have one for Google AdWords and one for my Prosper202 campaign. This way I can see conversions in both AdWords and Prosper202. The best part is it’s all automated! No more uploading.

Both Choices are Good

I could go on forever talking about the features offered by Prosper202 but the point of this post was to simply point out that no matter whether you choose a hosted or self hosted PPC tracking solution, there are going to be service interruptions that you can’t control. My last post was heated and shot from the hip and I apologize to Wes for that. I feel that both Tracking202 and Prosper202 are powerful solutions that give marketers a choice. For me, Prosper202 was the way to go, and for you it might be Tracking202. You have to decide for yourself.

I am interested to know how many of you use PPC tracking software and which ones you think are the most useful. If you would like to share your thoughts, please feel free to post a comment.

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1. Quick Tips: Prosper202, CPA Offers, and Email Campaigns
2. EPC – What Is It and What It Means to You
3. Learn From Your Problems