So I have been clearing out my database monthly but I would really like to see stats for some of my longer performing campaigns. I am tired of just losing the data and not being able to look at day/time trends over the span of a few months to save more money.
I thought about maybe exporting the larger campaigns to Excel before I wipe the database?
Anyone have any better options than that? Is there a way to have a separate cpvlab installation and send the data one month at a time to that? Last time I got BeyondHosting to do that, they said I would need a separate backup every time, so it was kind of useless not being able to see the data altogether.
Thanks!
I think that is possible only if you get someone to code a custom script for you.
I reckon you can get it done for $100-$200 on Odesk.
Thanks, but what does everyone else do? Does everyone just wipe the information and forget about it or what?
This might sound complicated if you don't have any experience in MySQL, but it's actually easy enough and can be done in 5 minutes.
I export the MySQL database via phpMyAdmin and save the SQL file for a period of high volume.
Then I reset all campaigns via CPVlab and optimise/repair tables via phpMyAdmin for speed.
If I want to analyse old data, I would use my other cpvlab licence on a separate domain to read the old file.
I have 4-5 licences though so traffic flow is not interrupted.
If that sounds too complicated, go with bbrock32's suggestion. They would need to run a cron job on a php file to pull data from your live cpvlab database to your old one, this way you would have all the data accessible via one cpvlab, while keeping the other fairly fast.
There were many good suggestions on improving CPVlab, including a separate interface for analyzing old/large campaigns. It seems that the developers don't care anymore, so I suggest to order a script with a function as snipe says and split the costs.
This is a significant problem - and one I'm working on, actually (although not within CPVLab).
The basic issue is that the way CPVLab's database is designed means it's very hard for it to process the massive volume of data from months of stats into usable reports. That's not something that's easily fixable: whilst you could potentially load a week or so's stats at a time into CPVLab and look at them, it's impossible to get a wider view of weeks or months, because you're suddenly asking CPVLab to process 10,000,000 plus rows of data. Whilst it's possible to do that with a MySQL database, it's not really possible to do that with affiliate click data given the way that Prosper and CPVLab are designed.
As bbrock and snipe say, you could potentially set a script or tool up to load a week at a time's data into CPVLab and review it, or load it in manually using MySQL. That gives you the ability to "peek" into the past, but loading that data in would take a while - a few minutes to a couple of hours depending on how much data you have. And you'd still not be able to get a look at more than a week or so's data at once.
(Oh, also - check you can load the data back in OK. There are a number of non-obvious gotchas with loading large datasets into MySQL, some of which can be a right bastard to get round. You may need a database expert to make everything run smoothly under some circumstances.)
The best solution is to either redesign your tracker or design a new tool to process the data and store actionable stats in a more compact format. I know Mr Baffoe has done something similar to that in the past for the hosted version of Prosper, and it's something I've looked into in the past too. However, it's a bigger design challenge than just a backup/restore tool.
As I mentioned, this is a problem I'm looking into. Feel free to PM me if you want more info on that as and when I have something usable!