Tracking202 Pissed Me Off Today!
I recently started a new campaign and have been tracking it for a week now. Up until then I have really loved using Tracking202 because I can gain so much information about my campaign, ads, keywords, landing pages, and placements. If you’ve never used Tracking202, it’s a free PPC tool that gathers information about your campaigns which you can then use to optimize a campaign’s performance. This is particularly important while you are testing a new campaign in order to become profitable. Today however, that all changed.
I first noticed something was wrong when I tried to login to Tracking202 and look at yesterday’s performance. The login screen was down and the error message was not a friendly one. I tried again, but still the site was not functioning. I then decided to login to Azoogle and see if I had gotten any traffic. As far as I could tell I received clicks during the early hours of the morning but all traffic after that seemed to have stopped. I was now starting to get worried so I logged into my Adwords and Yahoo accounts. Just as I had expected, they were still sending traffic.
Just to clarify the situation, Tracking202 generates special tracking links that you use in your PPC ads. These links gather information about visitors and then send them to your landing pages. Tracking202 aslo provides you with some special Javascript that you place on your landing pages and they also give you new links that direct traffic to your affiliate offers. I decided I needed to test those links and to my astonishment they were no longer working. I now realized that Google and Yahoo were sending traffic to broken links which was costing me money.
What I am getting at is that Tracking202 has been a great tool but unfortunately I was naieve to trust a hosted service. I tried to access the Tracking202 site after I realized that I was losing money and I noticed a new message stating that the site was going through some minor upgrades and would be up shortly. I really doubt that was the case. If they had planned on taking the site down I would have recieved an email. What kind of company would take a site down for maintenance and cost their customers thousands of dollars and not bother to tell anyone? In my oppinion they got hacked and just tried to cover the issue up by putting a phony maintenance message up.
I hate to be critical and I applogize to my readers for such a negative post, but Tracking202 sucks. If you’ve lost money due to their negligence I would love to hear about it. In the mean time I’ll be moving my PPC tracking to an in house solution.
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I think any hosted service has this vulnerability. Why not Prosper 202 or Optimize My Site?
Hi Jason,
Sorry you feel the way you do. To clarify, the system didn't get hacked. And honestly, it was a maintenance problem. What had happened was the hosting company we were working with deleted php from the server software and ended up crashing the entire server. As much as we would have love to give everyone notice on what happened, we ourselves did not realize there was a problem until we saw the site down ourselves. We immediate contacted the hosting company at that point and had to throw a last minute message up. They were obviously working on it as we called in and said they're doing what they could to bring the server back up.
In a situation as the above, I hope that you could understand where we were coming from. The best solution possible, would be to download the self-hosted version, and use Prosper202 so that something like this wouldn't affect your campaigns. Again, however, I do apologize for the issue.
One more thing to note, we stayed up till about 6am working with the hosting company to ensure everything was up. The downtown was approximately between 2:20am till close to 6am. Roughly a 3.5 hour down time. We will be blogging about the situation later today. Again, I do apologize for the inconvenience but the problem was out of our control and I know that's not an excuse or anything, but I do hope that you understand.
Jeremy, this is excellent advice as usual and I am definitely moving in that direction.
Steven, I must admit that I have really enjoyed Tracking202 because it is such a nicely designed application and it is unfortunate that your host dropped PHP scripting on you. However, the interruption in service made me rethink how I track my campaigns. I am going to try a self hosted solution like Prosper202 because I really don't like having to rely on others. This way when there's a problem I am the only one to blame. I appreciate your comments and will provide a follow up post about my Prosper202 experience.
Extremely sorry about this Jason, it's my fault the servers went down. I requested the system admins to install a new php module to help us debug code on the live servers resulting in the unexpected 3 hour apache/php service failure. You are correct, I should have reworded the maintenance message to something else, the servers weren't hacked, and although it was sort of maintenace (and the module finally did get instaled) it wasn't going as it was supposed to, and should have had an advanced warning. Appreciate your time to write this blog-post, because the most critical feedback is the best feedback. -wes
Well I actually have just the opposite problem. i host prosper202 on my own server and my host's MySQL service went down last night without me knowing which means all my links to offers didn't work, losing me a ton of cash today. If I had used Tracking202 I would not have had this problem because it would have been hosted on the 202 servers.
The point is that no matter where you host your stat tracking service there is always a chance that something is going to go wrong. Whether you use the Tracking202 hosted version or you install it on your own servers things can happen.
It's not the guys at 202's fault, it was an interruption of service by the hosting provider… had nothing to do with 202.
Right now, 2008 October 24, 4:21 PM Eastern Time, the whole site is down again.
And this is not the first time this has happened.
Guys, I've given you enough chances, buh-bye.
Joel, have you tried Prosper202 yet? I totally love it! I've been running it for a while now and haven't had a problem yet. Their interface is really the best.
Hi there,
I use their self-hosted version – Prosper202 – I love it. If it's down, my whole server's down.
PLUS, I can use multiple set-ups to keep different areas or subjects separated. For example, I advertise authors who have events in multiple cities. This necessitates the same keywords in different geographically targeted campaigns. I now use a separate Prosper202 setups for each author. It makes it SO easy – and fast – to see what's going on.
It's easy to install – I can help if you have any glitches.
Jocelyn,
Thanks for comments and the offer to help. I have been using Prosper202 for 2 months now and I absolutely love it. I did a follow up post about Propser202 about 1 month ago and I'm planning on writing a post comparing it to other solutions. I'm glad to hear others enjoy Prosper202 as much as I do. Thanks again.