How to Track Individual Ads with FB + Prosper with Meta Refresh/Redirect (6)

So, I know I can create an individual tracking link for each individual ad I'm running, but I don't understand how I can do it using a redirect in front of my tracking link. Here's my tracking path now:

RelevantToOffer.com > redirect > Prosper Tracking Link > redirect > Offer Page

Since I'm using the "RelevantToOffer.com" url when setting up my campaigns and ads on FB, how can I track each individual ad? Would I need a separate relevant url for each individual ad? There must be a better way...

If I understand your question correctly, you're gonna have to pass some parameters along through your redirect. Whatever page is doing the redirect to prosper can grab your parameters and inject them into your prosper URL before doing the redirect. This can be done with just a few lines of PHP code on the redirect page.

I like to track individual ads too so that I know what images are converting and which ones are not. The way I do it is to give each campaign an unique ID and then each image that I test gets an unique image ID. Together the imgID + campID tells me exactly which ad sent the click.

This allows me to easily look at any click and know exactly which ad it came from. This method also allows me to use Prosper's Group Overview view to group by the parameters that I used. This way I can group by campaign ID first and then by the image ID next. With this view I can quickly see how each image in a particular campaign is performing.

-Aaron

Sweet. So based of your help, here's what I came up with:

1) Add parameters to vanity url: http://relatedtooffer.com/redirect/?tracking=123
2) Upload PHP script to vanity url, which includes the prosper link. Example:

Bang on stackcash. Do you have Maxmind GeoIP databases/PHP extensions set up on your server? If so you can add geo-redirection to that script to further control the chaos. Here is my tutorial script - btw, it pays to first run the script in 'approval mode' then switch it to active once ads have gone through. By this I mean configure it to bounce people straight to the offer (bypassing ALL tracking and aff links) during approval.

Approval mode

<?php
header('Location: http://offerurl.com'); //the offer page, no redirects or affiliate links here!
?>

<?php
//First we need to get the parameters passed with the URL after the ?. We do this using $_GET['name'] - here 'name' is whatever we had in the URL, i.e. subid1, subid2, etc. Then we are going to set them to be equal to a variable - here I just use the same thing, $subid1, $subid2, etc. Variables start with $ 

   $subid1 = $_GET['subid1']; //Subid 1
   $subid2 = $_GET['subid2']; //Subid 2
   $subid3 = $_GET['subid3']; //Subid 3
     
   $geoip = geoip_record_by_name( $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] );
   $country_code = $geoip['country_code']; // Here we are calling on the geoip module to process the persons IP and lookup the corresponding two letter country code in the GeoIP database, e.g. US, CA, AU, etc. This value is then used to set the variable $geoip. So $geoip = US for exaple.


//simple redirect based on the detected country code above. Here we tell the server to look at the variable $geoip, and based on what it is, do something. We can say if the country code is = US, do this. Or if it is equal to AU, do this. And if it fits none of these, do something default.
switch($country_code) {
case 'US';case 'CA';case 'GB';case 'NZ';case 'AU';case 'FR';case 'BE';case 'DE';case 'AT';case 'CH';
$redirect[1] = 'http://affiliateurl.com/?a=XXXXX&c=XXXX&s1='.$subid1.'&s2='.$subid2.'&s3='.$subid3; //here we can insert our tracking parameters subid1-5 into the link, but have to be careful to get it written correctly!
$number = mt_rand(1,1); //picks a random number between 1 and 1. Can use this to rotate between different offer links if needed, though you may be able to do this inside your tracking platform (e.g. CPVlab, prosper) instead.
header("Location:$redirect[$number]");
exit;

default: //exceptions
header('Location: http://offerurl.com'); //the offer page, no redirects or affiliate links here unless you want to track people outside your designated countries.
exit;
} 
?>

Ah, you're the man. My knowledge of PHP is minimal, at best. I was screaming at my computer until 1am last night trying to get this to work. Ended up dropping Nana a line and determined that the redirect I was using wasn't going to pass the dynamic info into prosper. I ended up telling myself to "get to work" rather than dicking around with it for another 4 hours. Went back to using the normal meta refresh with campaigns that had 3 ads each. I figured if I couldn't track each ad individually, I'd keep the number of ads as low as possible.

I'll definitely be digging into this soon - and most likely hitting you up with a ton of frantic questions.

Your questions are welcome ;D

Firstly some from me - what server setup are you using? Are you using the STM p202 or vanilla Prosper?