Prosper202: The Love Hate Relationship
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 19:13It wasn’t up until about a month ago that I really started tracking my clicks. I decided if I was going to be serious then I would need some serious software. The main reason I wasn’t using Prosper202 was because of Tracking202 which had some terrible reviews from inside the community because people think they are stealing your campaign data. You can’t blame them I guess, I mean you have to be someone paranoid in our business some times.
For the most part I really do like Prosper202. It has you set up everything in detail, what affiliate network the offer is on, what PPC network are you driving clicks from, organizes you keywords, lets you set your CPC, really the whole deal. And in all honesty it was a little intimidating at first.
the rest of this post is me pretty much venting
But what can go? Get rid of the fucking text ad bullshit (no wonder people think you steal their campaigns). Honestly, if your testing a bunch of ads its so annoying to have to duplicate that ad into Prosper202. I was confused as shit at first. Yes it’s great for aesthetics but it’s a total waste of time. Add another tracking variable so you can pass some ID for that ad into Prosper202.
Say for example I was running a campaign about cars. Now in the campaign I may have an ad group call Honda. It would be so much easier to append another variable on my tracking link with a variable that looks like this (&p is just for illustration): &p=cars_honda_adtype_001. The adtype being either shorthand for a domain or type of person being targeted or whatever. This is 1000 times easier IMHO. Especially if I’m split testing the very specifics of the the ad, I may have one ending in _001 or _002 or _003 and that’s it – otherwise I have to create 3 freaking ads! You may disagree but I doubt it. You can do this with Yahoo! Search Marketing because in order to pass your keywords you have to enable it in another option and it will put them into the url where with other platforms like MSN Adcenter and Google you use the {keyword} after your keyword tracking variable.
minor annoyance rant
Also the text ads don’t handle quotations “” correctly. The quotations come out with a backslash (/) in front of them because they where imported into the database with a backslash to prevent an SQL injection. Yes I get it. Fix it – they shouldn’t show up. Then if you edit it the backslashes start piling up, I had a few ads that I went back to edit with three backslashes before each quote. It’s really not that hard to run a stripslashes() (PHPfunction to remove the backslashes) on that. It’s such a trivial thing you’d think it would be fixed by now.
end rant
So that’s how I feel. It’s good for the most part with some really stupid things going on. Now go make monies.
                |
Steven says:
October 1st, 2008 at 8:15 pm
The text ad function is actually for your own reference. While you can copy your text ad over, you can also name it whatever you want if its easier to track it. Theres no rule that says you have to copy an exact text ad over if that makes it easier. You are also welcome to append variables to the URL already if you want to track things that way.
As for the backslash issue, check to see if magic quotes is on for your server and may need to be turned off. If that’s not it, maybe I am mistaken.
In this industry, no matter what anyone does, if its a tracking tool, and you’re not as big as Google or something, people will have their doubts. Part of eliminating that concern was creating the self-hosted version. The setup may be a bit confusing at first so people may not know how to set up things correctly but we tried to make it as user friendly as possible. That said, I do appreciate the feedback. Hope things are working out great.
Wes Mahler says:
October 1st, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Hey Brad, your right some of this issues need to be addressed. We’re in process of re-hauling over the system, but it is still awhile out as the system was built and is extremely hard to change, the only way to do it is completely rebuild it for the most part.
But yes those text-ads are really a pain, the best way that other people are just not using them as you can skip the entire section if needed. The text-ads area really needs to be worked, I agree, definitely taken note!
Although it isn’t really documented, there is a way to pass extra variables through on your affiliate link, to track extra-information like adgroups or whatever you want to track. It would have to be setup like Justins’ pre-pop code, which takes in a variable, and then adds extra information at the end of the affiliate link. in your case-adding extra information to the subid. http://www.exosus.com/?p=26
On the extra slashes, we are using MYSQL_REAL_ESCAPE_STRING which puts in the slashes to prevent mysql injection like you said. But it appears that the host the currently p202 installation on, also has MAGIC QUOTES ON which puts an additional slashes to prevent mysql injeciton, so now its adding in the extra slashes. (we use the mysql_real_escape_string, because just relying on MAGIC QUOTES is unsecure.)
Your absolutely right, we need to fix some things, I don’t have an exact date, we are working on a new version of tracking202 to be released on Oct 22nd, sorry about all of the hassle with anything, some things need re-working, and thanks for bringing it to attention further as it does help!
Brad says:
October 1st, 2008 at 10:17 pm
As for Magic Quotes I should have mentioned that, however that should be automatically detected and dealt with accordingly or you could just stripslashes() regardless.
Thanks for pointing out that post Wes, however we are on separate pages. By doing it the way he did it your loosing out on one of the best features of Prosper202 which is being able to determine exactly what click and ad caused a conversion. By doing what is posted your loosing that tracking power, and I’ll be doing a post [hopefully soon] on how to get around that. You see because doing it that way doesn’t allow us to track our ad [if you don't set it up in Prosper202] without building another app.
Don’t get me wrong it can be done, it’s just kind of a pain in the ass to have to build another app to do it that way. Waste of time IMHO.
Whether or not that makes any sense, I want to thank you guys for actually taking the time to read the post and comment.
Why You Should Be Using Prosper202, A Good Campaign Isn’t All Adcopy and LP. | Mad PPC says:
October 7th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
[...] sure did write a craptacular post about Prosper202. Yeah it was a rant, that’s for sure. However if it wasn’t for [...]