A PPC Marketer’s Best Friend - Prosper202

Posted by Mike Wong

April 29, 2009

by Mike Wong

The key to a profitable PPC campaign is figuring out which of your keywords convert into leads, and which do not. So how do you track which keywords are the profitable ones? Enter Prosper202.

Prosper202 was developed by Wes Mahler of Tracking202, and is free tracking script that offers real-time tracking of your PPC campaigns. You can download the script from their website, and you will need to host it on your own web host. However, it is recommended that if you are planning on sending a large amount of clicks through the script that you make sure and put it on its own dedicated server.

Once installed, you can start setting up your individual campaigns to track. This is done through the setup tab, and you can see all the steps involved in the submenu. The first two steps are to add in your PPC accounts (Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing) and Affiliate Networks (FluxAds, NeverblueAds, etc) into the system.

The next step is to put in your Affiliate campaign. Here you will enter in the offer name, the affiliate url and payout. For the url, you will need to get this from the specific affiliate network’s offer page. Make sure to include the subid parameter which is usually specific to the CPA network you are using.

You will also have the options to rotate and cloak your links. If you only want to send traffic to one offer, you can ignore the rotate option, but this is useful for testing the conversion rates between several similar offers. Cloaking your links makes it so your Affiliate Manager will be unable to see where your traffic is coming from and I would suggest you use this to protect your traffic sources.

For PPC campaigns, you can normally direct link to an offer, or send the visitor to a landing page. If you use a landing page, then you will need to put it in as well. Once you have done that, you will get a snippet of javascript to install onto your landing page. You will also have to change any links to your offer to the one the Prosper202 gives you as well.

Lastly, you will need to get your links. This is the url that you will use when setting up your PPC campaign. You may need to add in an extra argument to it to track your keywords properly. This will depend on the PPC advertising platform you are using and is explained in detail on the page.

To enable real-time tracking of your conversions, you can also get the global tracking pixel from Prosper202 and email it to your Affiliate Manager for placement. This pixel should get placed on the confirmation page of the offer you are running and will alert the tracking script whenever a lead or sale has been made. This is an optional step, but if you don’t do it, you will have to manually enter in the subids of the converting sales into Prosper202 yourself.

With everything setup properly, you should now be able to see exactly which keywords are leading to sales. By removing all the unprofitable keywords from your PPC campaign, you should start to see your campaigns start making more and more profits. As you can see, having a tracking system like Prosper202 is one of the keys to a successful PPC campaign.

About the Author:

Mike Wong has been a successful Pay Per Click marketer for several years and uses Affiliate Theme to develop his landing pages and Prosper202 for tracking his Pay Per Click Campaigns. You can learn about more Prosper202 tricks on his site.

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