Track Your PPC Campaigns In-House
Several months ago the guys from Tracking202 let Nickycakes beta test their ppc campaign tracking service. It was pretty sweet. It let you monitor everything down to the keyword level in terms of traffic, conversions, ROI, etc. Pretty much everything you need to track and optimize your campaign. It even had a sweet realtime ajax traffic monitor that let you see the clicks coming in.
But when they asked Nickycakes if he thought the service would be popular, he had a few problems with it. Most importantly, it wasn’t self-hosted. It was hosted on the Tracking202 servers. People would obviously be skeptical of any ppc tracking platform that wasn’t self-hosted because it would allow the admins of the service to view anyone’s campaign data and easily duplicate profitable campaigns for themselves. They assured the Cakes that they wouldn’t be stealing anyone’s data and that the service was meant to help people and build traffic for their site. While this explanation was good enough for Nickycakes, he told them that it would NOT be good enough for the general public. Because of this, Nicky decided not to make a post about it. As predicted, the public release of Tracking202 met with mediocre results. The guys were even banned from Wickedfire forums for advertising it, just due to the possibility that they could use it to steal peoples keyword data.
To clear up any misconceptions, the guys immediately started working on a solution. A self-hosted solution. A FREE self-hosted solution. So it’s pretty much the exact same service now, except you install it and host it yourself, ridding yourself of the possibility that your keyword data can be jacked. Good deal.
As mentioned earlier, Nickycakes did have a chance to try Tracking202 out when it was hosted on their servers, and was really impressed, to be honest. He gave it a trial run with one of his own small campaigns and was really happy with the tracking. It basically lets you see graphs of each keyword and ad copy, and its profitability. So you can basically set up a campaign with a couple thousand keywords, dump a decent amount of money into it for traffic, look at which keywords converted into profit, and delete the rest, and you have a completely profitable campaign. Doesn’t get much easier than that.
Anyway they just released it so go check it out at http://www.prosper202.com. Leave a comment here and let everyone know what you think.
Can’t wait to break the training wheels off this bad boy. I can already see the dollar signs.
nice, so much better than google analytics
I can’t wait until they incorporate the actual CPC data. That way the ROI and every other figure is exact and not a overly broad “estimation” —
If you are a smart affiliate, you track keywords down to the penny. You can’t simply “estimate” how much you’re making@!
@josh google doesn’t even provide you with actual cpc data, so no idea what you’re talking about.
you can enter the AVERAGE cpc into this software no problem
Could someone please offer a comparison to Xtreme Conversions?
Thanks!
Nice, I caught this as well this morning. Considering how Wes is I would imagine it will only get better!
I haven’t personally done this, but others I know have already dezended the thing and it appears to be squeaky clean. There are just two references to their servers. One is an RSS pull. The other is just some html code that includes a blank image, probably so they can track overall usage of the thing.
The real question is: how do they plan to monetize?
@eric b: im not sure if im supposed to discuss it, but they were originally planning on selling the service. instead they decided to use this as a way to grow a user base for future products/services.
I would assume they plan to use some sort of paid upgrade model.
Can you install this on one domain and track all of your campaigns or do you have to install it on each domain you are running a campaign for? Thanks
Install on one and track all campaigns
Hey,
I have been using T202 for a while, met wes through AM stuff online and he and his whole team are all great guys, i know they are not stealing my data as i have worked closely with ( even wrote lots of the copy for T202.com) them and there is nothing shady going on.
Prosper202 is even sweeter and should shut up all the haters. it is a real service to the industry and will keep future programs similar to SpeedPPC from charging insane amounts, It’s about time someone comes out with something to change the industry and stop ppl from overcharging for average software…
Yeah, but how does it compare to Xtreme Conversions? Thanks.
Thanks for the comments guys!
@Bill, Xtreme Conversions is a product I use to hear worked very well, but it is extremely old, I mean just checkout the xtreme conversions screenshot: http://www.xconversions.com/images/xcreport.png
Tracking202 was built specifically for CPC CPA Lead gen. Tons more features, just compare the screenshots to compare for yourself: http://tracking202.com/screenshots