Home > Questions and Answers > Tracking Questions

Setting Up My First Campaign (Help!) (11)

02-01-2014 06:17 PM #1 sethnejame (Member)
Setting Up My First Campaign (Help!)

Alright everyone. I have been reading my ass off here on STM, Nickycakes, Ngo, etc. and figuring out how exactly all this AM stuff works. This morning, I finally decided to take action and purchased six months of VPS hosting from BeyondHosting and set up Prosper202.

I also signed on with 2 affiliate networks and received my first offer from one of them in the dating vertical. Now this is where the things get complicated.

This particular offer I'm running is from A4D. I am setting up the campaign in Prosper and I'm a little confused with how the affiliate links work. From Caurmen's guide, I'm at "Step 2: Set Up Offer" http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Campaign-Setup and I'm stuck right here:

Where do I get the affiliate URL? I'm on my Affiliate Portal and I'm looking at this offer page:

Now are the links I'm looking for the ones under the "Unique Link" tab? I blurred them out for privacy sake, but here's an example of how they read:

http://a4dtrk.com/?a=123456&c=1234&s1=

What the hell does that mean? And what's with the directions about Sub-IDs and non unique IDs? I am completely lost. Anyone have any input?

02-01-2014 08:37 PM #2 Adamw (AMC Alumnus)

Originally Posted by sethnejame

Where do I get the affiliate URL? I'm on my Affiliate Portal and I'm looking at this offer page:

Now are the links I'm looking for the ones under the "Unique Link" tab? I blurred them out for privacy sake, but here's an example of how they read:

http://a4dtrk.com/?a=123456&c=1234&s1=

What the hell does that mean? And what's with the directions about Sub-IDs and non unique IDs? I am completely lost. Anyone have any input?

Yes, the column labeled "Type": with the value of "Link" is the correct offer URL, that is your aff link (in CAKE). the a and c placeholders are your affiliate id and the offer id, and the s1 placeholder passes back a Sub Id. With cake networks, you always want to change the s1= to s2= because S1= is reserved for the non-unique ID's and s2, s3, s4, etc.. are reserved for your own unique id's.

So your link should look like this:

http://a4dtrk.com/?a=123456&c=1234&s2=

02-01-2014 09:10 PM #3 sethnejame (Member)

Ok. So the "Link" Value under "Type" is a premade landing page from the offer site, right? And basically, when people go to my domain, "http://www.blahblahblah" where my tracking is, the software will redirect and bring that page up? Is this correct?

What are the other values for under "Type" that say "Image" with the banners next to them? Also, there are multiple "Link" values under type with different types of landing page. Will any one work? Should I rotate them?

Thanks for the help. I'm starting to put this together. A lot going on here. . .

02-01-2014 09:12 PM #4 sethnejame (Member)

Also, this information comes up when I pull up the "Basic" tab for the offer. What does it all mean?

Description
Converts on: 2nd page - registration
Traffic Types: Display, Social, PPV, Search
Countries: US Only
Restrictions: 18+ Only, No Coreg or Incent

02-02-2014 12:06 AM #5 merezza (Member)

Originally Posted by sethnejame

Converts on: Tells you what page you get the payout from. For the second page, that means the user will have to click something on the first page that they arrive at. The first page might say "Click here to sign up!" and then on the second page they have to fill out some information. Once they fill out the information and submit it, then it tells you that you've generated a commission.
Traffic Types: Tells you where you can send traffic to the offer from. I don't know all the different ones out there but this is saying that you can send traffic from social networks, PPV campaigns, and search engines.
Countries: Tells you where you can promote it. This one is US only so they won't accept traffic from outside the US.
Restrictions: Tells you if there are any specific things that you can't do to get traffic. This one says that the people have to be 18+, you can't incentivize people to click your links and sign up, and you can't do coregs.

Hope that helps!

02-02-2014 02:03 AM #6 sethnejame (Member)

Thanks for the help Merezza. All of that makes sense. A couple of other questions:

1) The dating offer that I have has multiple links under the creative tab. I'm using A4D (Cake) and under the creatives tab I see 9 different affiliate links, all labeled things like "Vixen LP" or "Kisses LP". I have visited the different links and they all look like premade landing pages that lead to the conversion page. Is that the case? Am I suppose to use them all? And how do I track people who sign up on the second conversion page if I'm only sending them to these landing pages?

2) Also under the dating offer I see 10 different "image" values under the "Type" column. They appear to be different types/sizes of banner ads for the dating site. Am I supposed to use these to promote the landing pages from question #1? FB ad spaces are generally a lot smaller and sized differently from any of these banner examples. . .

Thanks again for the help.

02-03-2014 05:25 PM #7 caurmen (Administrator)

1) Treat those separate offer landing pages as separate offers, and split-test them as such. They'll all be tracked through your Postback, don't worry - that's the affiliate network's problem to sort out

2) Those are just example images that you could use to promote the offer on some traffic sources. I wouldn't advise using them most of the time, to be honest - make your own ads instead.

02-03-2014 06:08 PM #8 sethnejame (Member)

Thanks Caurmen! Upon closer inspection, the separate landing pages don't have the actual offer on them that converts (the registration). My AM suggested that I make my own LP and point it directly to the offer URL with the registration on it (which I am currently in the process of doing).

I will start a follow along campaign soon when I make sure that all my links are up and working.

Is there anything wrong with hosting your landing pages on the same server as your Prosper202 tracking software? Do I need to go out and buy a new domain name for these landing pages or should I just use a non-related one "shopourstuff.com" that I already have? Does it matter?

Thanks again!

02-03-2014 07:12 PM #9 merezza (Member)

This isn't really my area of expertise (yet) but I would suggest that you find something that would work for your chosen area. For example, if you were doing dating you might buy datingsource.com or something to put all your LPs on. That way you don't run into a situation where the URL for your adult ad is something like www.teddys-taxidermy.com/sex-sex-sex.html.

02-03-2014 09:06 PM #10 angry old lady (Member)

Thats a good point. Most people tend to put their tracker on a random url

Originally Posted by merezza

www.teddys-taxidermy.com/sex-sex-sex.html.

lol!

02-03-2014 10:08 PM #11 sethnejame (Member)

This is all really good stuff. Alright, one more question. I've finally got a campaign up and going, but the results are skewed. Under analysis, it shows how much money I've been spending for CPC. But POF charges you for CPM. How do I adjust prosper to do this? I started with .73 being my minimum CPM per Caurmen's tutorial suggestion.

Home > Questions and Answers > Tracking Questions