Home > Vendors >

---

Introducing mod9 - Self-hosted tracking (20)

---

Hey STM! You guys helped me get started with affiliate marketing last year, so I'm posting here first about what I've been working on the past several months.

I've created a self-hosting tracking platform which I call "mod9". Here's some screenshots and a rundown of some of mod9's features (click the images to enlarge):

The Dashboard



Pretty straightforward - the dashboard shows you today's stats, how today compares with the past few days, and provides quick access to today's most active campaigns.

Mobile-ready



mod9 has been designed to work equally well on standard browsers and on mobile devices, so you can easily use it on phones and tablets.

Campaign variables



You can add any number of "variables" to a campaign. In the screenshot above, I've added the "sex" and "age" variables so I can track these for a dating campaign. Other examples might be using a "keyword" variable for Adwords campaigns, a "country" variable for split-testing by different countries, "adsize" for tracking banner sizes, etc. You can make variables for anything you want!

Get campaign links



Since I've added the "age" and "sex" variables to my campaign, mod9 asks me for these values when I ask for my campaign URL. This makes using variables easy in mod9.

Easily adjust campaign CPCs



This feature is really handy. You can tell mod9 how much your campaign cost since any given time, and mod9 will automatically update your campaign's cost per click AND update previous cost data for old clicks. This is a big time-saver, and you don't have to worry about constantly keeping your click costs up to date.

Generate custom reports



mod9 gives you everything you could want to know about your campaign, offer, and landing page data: number of clicks, number of conversions, conversion rate, average cost per click, average earnings per click, total cost, total revenue, total profit, and ROI. You can even choose the timeframe to view this data, whether it's today, yesterday, last week, only March 7th, all time, or a custom date range. For some people, that's enough.

Then there are others. People who absolutely need to know how many women from the Dominican Republic converted after passing through their 3rd landing page variant from March 13th to July 8th. mod9 has those people covered with the "custom reports" feature. This allows you to make any number of "filters" to pass your click data through, so you're able to generate a custom table of only the clicks you care about. Filter by campaign, offer, landing page, date range, or even custom variables you've made, such as "age", "sex", "country", and so on.

View browser, platform, and ISP info



Here's an older screenshot from one of my previous campaigns (pardon the lack of color coding in the table, it's since been added!).

Want to track mobile campaigns? mod9 automatically tracks browser and platform information for each click, and will track ISP information if you upload a MaxMind database (not included).



Other features:

Set rules for ignoring certain clicks. Want to ignore clicks from a certain IP address, from search engine spiders, or from a certain ISP? mod9 allows you to set rules for which clicks it should ignore.

Fast redirect times. mod9 is structured to add clicks to the database as fast as possible before redirecting users to an offer or landing page. Wasting half a second might not seem like much, but it could be the difference between a break-even campaign and a profitable one.

Easy updates. Updates to mod9 are installed with a single button press, and don't typically take more than a few seconds.

Customize the data you want to see. Maybe you only care about total cost, revenue, and profit, and CPC/EPC data never cross your mind. mod9 lets you customize which data shows up and which data you'd rather hide from view.

View previous days. You can view any previous day's stat summary. No need to stay up until midnight to make sure you get an accurate picture of the day's stats. mod9 keeps data for the past 90 days.

100% private. Since it's self-hosted, nobody has access to your data.


The downside? mod9 uses a fairly exotic setup (MongoDB + Python + Flask), which means it is a royal pain to install. I strongly discourage attempts at installation unless you're very comfortable with server administration. We'll offer a professional installation service for $15, and might eventually work with hosts to provide automatic installation.

Server requirements:
Linux (Windows servers not supported)
Full root access (Not shared hosting!)
At least 1GB RAM recommended

Other info:

Pricing - Yes, mod9 will cost money, but it'll be cheaper than most current paid options. The pricing will be $26 per month or $250 per year, and the subscription will include any updates I release during that time. Installation service will be $15! We're taking a loss with the installation service so that the tough installation won't be a barrier for those who want to use mod9.

Any questions/comments? I'm hoping mod9 will turn out to be an awesome tool for everyone! Check https://mod9.org/ for updates, and if you have a private question, feel free to send me a PM or email support@mod9.org.

---

Looks really cool.

Is it easy to setup landingpage(s) and offer(s) and rotate between them?

---

Yep! Rotating landers and offers is easy: just add them, then when creating a campaign, select all the offers and landers you want to use with that campaign. If a campaign uses more than one offer or landing page, a random one will be chosen for each person that clicks through your tracking link.

---

Looks neat, but unless it logs into POF/FB to get ad spend, or has a easy csv import tool. I don't see
why I'd pay $250 for something that prosper does for free.

---

Thanks for the feedback!

mod9 has a unique feature to quickly update ad spend, as I mentioned above. Say you're looking at your Facebook campaigns, and you see that one of them costed you $765 over the last week. With mod9, all you would have to do is click the "Adjust CPC" icon on your campaign page, set the time frame, and enter $765 in the cost field. Based on the amount of clicks you've received in the past week, mod9 will automatically calculate your new "cost per click" for you. Here's a link to a screenshot of how that works. So even though mod9 doesn't log into Facebook for you, getting ad spend and adjusting your CPCs takes far less time than it does in Prosper202. (Not to mention, mod9 even modifies the cost of previous clicks for you, which Prosper can't do.) The benefit of this approach is that it works for any traffic source, not just Facebook.

Beyond that, here are a few features off the top of my head that mod9 has and Prosper doesn't:

• Automatically track browser and platform data. This way, you can see how, for example, iPhone users are performing versus Android users, or IE versus Chrome, and so on.
• Automatically track ISP/carrier data if you have a MaxMind GeoIP database, which is a must if you do mobile campaigns
• Easy landing page and offer rotation. Look how landing page rotation works with Prosper. With mod9, there's no need to mess around with clunky PHP scripts to do this kind of thing - it's part of the campaign creation process and takes about 5 seconds.
• Custom reports - this is huge. Check above to see how this works. Suppose you want to see how a landing page performed for male users versus female users. mod9 can do this with custom reports!
• Looks nice on mobile devices. I like checking my stats on my phone if I'm not at home, and I've used "responsive web design" with mod9. This means that it looks great whether you use it on a desktop, phone, or tablet.
• Track how well you have been doing today compared to yesterday, the past three days, or the past week, right from the dashboard page.
• View any previous day's summary.
• Selectively ignore clicks by IP, browser, platform, or ISP (with MaxMind)
• Included support! If you don't understand something, you can always shoot us an email. The included documentation is also very thorough.

Even if you didn't use any of the above features, let's just say you saved only 2 hours per month (a conservative estimate!) from the easier lander/offer rotation functionality and the faster CPC adjustment feature. In this case, if your time is worth any more than $12.50 per hour, than getting the $25/month subscription would be worth it.

Depending on user feedback, I might whip up a CSV import tool if the CPC adjustment tool doesn't cut it!

---

Nice UI!

A few questions:

1) Is the source code open? If not, how do users know that data isn't being funneled out?

2) How are updates performed if it's just a click of a button? What is the level of security?

3) Are there any mass CPC/spend update functions? Or do you have to update CPC one by one. It would be unfeasible for thousands of campaigns/sites/etc.

4) Have you stress tested with 1 mil+ daily clicks? What are the performance results?

5) Does it support split testing of multi-path landing pages and offers? As well as offer wall types and email submit landing pages?

6) It has mobile variables, but how about redirect rules?

Thanks!

---

looks pretty cool.

about to setup CPVlabs....

hows it stack up with cpvlababs?

any issues running this for your own offers vs affiliate stuff?

---

Thanks!

1) The source code is open. No clicks are funneled out, of course, and people who get mod9 are free to check the code themselves. (The relevant parts would be the click(), depart(), and postback() functions in mod9/views/public.py)

2) Updates are performed by a) checking mod9.org to see what the latest version is, b) downloading the latest version directly onto the server in a directory the server user has permissions to, c) verifying that no third party has modified the source code by verifying the checksum with mod9.org, then d) installing the update in a closed off virtual environment using Python's easy_install tool. All communications with mod9.org are secure and encrypted through HTTPS.

3) Yes, you can check multiple campaigns in the "campaign" page, then select "edit", and change the click cost for many campaigns at a time.

4) I tested the following my 1GB Linode VPS setup:

With 100,000 clicks in a single day:
The "dashboard" page takes 1.5 seconds longer to load than with 0 clicks.
The "campaign", "offer", and "landing pages" pages take about half a second longer than with 0 clicks.

With 1,000,000 clicks in a single day:
The dashboard page took about 14 seconds longer to load than with 0 clicks.
The "campaign", "offer", and "landing pages" pages took about 6 seconds longer than with 0 clicks.
The database service used 230MB of RAM, and the database took up 275MB of space (this can vary a bit depending on, e.g. how many variables per click)

No matter how many clicks were in the database, new clicks are added to the database in less than 0.01 seconds on average. Most mod9 pages default to only showing today's stats by default, and the number of clicks from previous days does not significantly effect loading time.

Conclusions: 14 seconds is too long to wait for page loads IMO. Those getting 1mil+ clicks per day should probably go with a tracking platform designed to handle that much volume (perhaps Voluum?). That being said, mod9 can handle 100,000 clicks per day no problem, especially if your server is more powerful than the $20/month Linode VPS I tested on.

Here's a screenshot of the dashboard with 1 million clicks!

5) Yep, mod9 can handle "offer wall" type landing pages - I actually recently added this feature. When you grab your campaign link, you can choose to make a landing page link always direct the user to a specific offer, rather than the default behavior of rotating offers. Here's a screenshot. If by email submit landing pages you're referring to landing pages which pass a user-entered email address to the landing page, then mod9 doesn't currently support this.

6) mod9 doesn't yet have a redirect rule feature. In the future, I'd like to implement the ability to redirect for any variable. This would allow for not only redirecting based upon carrier or device type, but also things like country redirects, redirecting men and women to different pages or offers, older users to different pages than younger users, and so on.

To be honest, I don't have much experience with CPVLab! From what I have seen, mod9's feature set is a bit larger, and I think mod9 has an advantage in terms of UI and ease of use, yet that's in my humble, biased opinion. Once mod9 launches, I'd love to hear people's thoughts on how the two compare.

There are no issues with running your own offers, as long as you have some way of doing postbacks!

Edit: Also, I just launched https://mod9.org/! The initial release will be out within 7 days, so keep an eye on the site!

---

Update to question #3:

The most tedious part IMO about any universal click tracker right now is the tedious updating of CPC's for hundreds or even thousands of campaigns.

They each have a different CPC. What I meant was it would be killer to have some sort of .csv upload function where you can update CPC's for all the campaigns at once.

Sorry, I didn't mean updating the SAME CPC for a bunch of campaigns.

---

Ah, I see what you're saying. So you'd like to be able to download a .csv report from Facebook, POF, or another traffic source, then have mod9 automatically update cost data for the relevant campaigns? I may be able to implement that as long as the mod9 campaign names match the campaign names on the traffic source.

Different traffic sources have different .csv formats though. Off the top of your head, what traffic sources have you used that allow exporting data via .csv?

---

mod9 is now officially released! Head over to https://mod9.org/ to purchase a subscription and have us install it for you!

Here's another feature I haven't mentioned yet: day and week parting stats for every campaign!

Here are a couple screenshots (click to enlarge):

By hour:


You can change your timezone in mod9's "Settings" page. The parting stats are for your currently set time zone.

By weekday:


This is a huge money saver on traffic sources that allow day parting!

---

You ever get multiple offers on one lander tracking properly? Prosper can't do it, not sure if this can.

Let me know.

---

Yep, I recently added that feature; here's a screenshot of it. Just choose the offer you want the URL to point to, then mod9 gives you a URL to paste in your lander. Copy the links for each offer you want to promote on your lander, paste them in your lander, and you're good to go!

---

Will it track clicks to lander, vs CTR for offer 1 and offer 2 (and obviously total clicks for each), along with conversions?

Can it pass through variables to the actual offer link for tracking on the network end too?

---

mod9 will track total landing page CTRs, so if a user clicks on any of the offers on that page, it will count as a click-through. However, if you want to compare how many users are visiting offer 1 vs offer 2 for your lander (for example), you could do this using mod9's "Custom Report" feature. In the custom report page, you would select "Offers", then filter by "Landing Page" and select the multi-offer landing page that you're using. mod9 will then generate a report so you can compare the number of clicks/conversions, ROI, CPC/EPC, etc of the different offers from users that passed through your landing page.

Also, mod9 has standard "Landing Page" and "Offer" pages, so you can view the stats for all your landing pages and offers at any time.

mod9 doesn't pass anything through offer links except for the click IDs (subIDs).

---

i don't like black background, can i change it ?

---

I am a sucker for exotic technology, will give it a go just for fun

---

There isn't any way to change the background, sorry!

Awesome, hope you like it.

---

Anyone end up using this? Seems like the site is down. Looking for something new to use for tracking since prosper / CPVLab / Voluum all cannot track 2 step conversions properly.

---

seems like the product is dead

---

Home > Vendors >