Some post first-campaign questions! (5)
So I ran my first campaign yesterday on exoclick, and I think I did pretty well. I was actually profiting for the first half of my budget, but by the time my $20 budget was exhausted I ended up with with approx: $20 spent and $15 lead revenue -> -$5 profit, which I think is not bad for my first attempt.
Some questions after my first campaign:
1) My leads were not tracked in prosper, but my clicks were tracked in prosper! This is very frustrating and has caused me to wonder why I even need prosper? What can I see from prosper that I cannot see directly in my stats from Exoclick? Caurmen wrote "We're using Prosper because we want to know how people who have clicked on our adverts (or just been shown our landers if we're running PPV) behave" in the guide, but couldn't I just have my own script called out.php?id=3847 for example, that when loaded, logs the ID and redirects to the offer? I'm just a little frustrated at prosper because I followed the guide and I don't know why the leads weren't captured, and it seems like It would be quicker for me to build my own solution than debug my prosper setup.
2) Waiting for campaigns to be approved is a BITCH.
Have any of you played around with parameters for your LP to avoid this? For example, I could set up 4 campaigns like this:
Campaign 1: Banner ad -> myLandingPage.com/offer.php?lp=lp1&offer=adult-offer1 -> offer page
Campaign 2: Banner ad -> myLandingPage.com/offer.php?lp=lp2&offer=adult-offer2 -> offer page
Campaign 2: Banner ad -> myLandingPage.com/offer.php?lp=lp2&offer=adult-offer3 -> offer page
Then once my campaigns are approved, I can do whatever I want to my LP because I can change what those parameters represent on my end! This would eliminate the problem of having to wait for campaigns to get approved when all I want to do is change the landing page, unless I wanted to change something like traffic source country, or a parameter that exoclick controls. I haven't done this yet, just an idea I wanted to run by you guys here.
This makes me wonder though, will this get me in trouble with the network, because the URL they approved is dynamically chaning? Do you see any potential issues given the experience you may have, or any other ideas, tips, solutions?
Thanks!
1) That's basically what Prosper202 does... by building your own script and then crunching the data manually you're basically trying to reinvent the wheel - better to work with a much more complex and capable tracking system.
2) I don't work with Exoclick but I presume you need to get all ads approved regardless of the URL destination? If so, there's no real point in getting overly complex with dynamic lander rotation. You control the lander content anyway so you can just change the landing page content at will, and can do so based on passed querystrings if you want... but I don't see how it speeds up ad approval.
You won't get in trouble for landing page rotation unless the traffic source (not the network) prohibits it OR they want to approve every lander used, in which case you can always show a rep all of them. Of course if the affiliate network requires creatives approval then you may want to get all the rotated landers approved as well.
You mentioned Prosper202 wasn't tracking leads. You seem to understand PHP/querystrings well so this should be easy to fix... First check the campaigns section where you have your affiliate link and make sure the numerical subid is being passed to the affiliate network, via adding [[subid]] to the link in p202. Then, check at the affiliate network that these numbers are appearing. If so, make sure your postback URL is the one p202 gives you and that you have dynamically inserted the [[subid]] number back into the postback URL by using e.g. ##subid2##, {aff_sub2}, etc.
As long as the subid numbers have been passed you can always manually add the conversions via the update tab.
Thanks zeno!
BTW, one (weird) tip if you've had postback issues - you can manually export the converting subids from your affiliate network, then import them into Prosper. That'll give you the same data as if your postback had fired properly.
perfect, just updated my stats, thanks for the tip!
Home > Questions and Answers > Tracking Questions