The Most Active and Friendliest
Affiliate Marketing Community Online!

“Adavice”/  “RollerAds”/

Prosper202 doesn't save all information

Ered Mithrin

Get your fix Ninja!
please bear with me, i'm trying to give you and idea how and why i do things the way i do them. i'm opened to any suggestion, because i realize there might be a simpler solution to what i'm trying to achieve. i did my best to describe things in a way that should be understandable, but if not, i'd be more than happy to rephrase or clarify them.

i've been trying to tweak my p202 installation to its best, so that i have reports at one place (p202) and can analyze them quickly and comfortably (if i can say that about analyzing tons of data :) in excel with pivot tables. all seemed to be fine, but then i started noticing that for some clicks p202 didn't record all the information that has been passed from a ppc network (sometimes partner id1, sometimes partner id2, sometimes a keyword and sometimes all of it).

i thought this might be caused by a slow shared hosting where my previous installation of p202 was. to rule this out, i installed p202 on a beyond hosting provider, which was recommended on a few places.

and because now i don't know what might be causing these random outages (i haven't found any pattern in it), i'm wondering if it can be caused by my syntax. here's how i track things (if you have a better solution, please let me know)...

there're many of cpa networks that offer subid1 only or up to subid1-5, i decided to stick with subid1 and because i'm analyzing data by exporting clicks from p202 into excel, i'm saving all the information into this one field, which should makes it easy for me to work with across multiple traffic sources later. my affiliate link might look like this

Code:
http://www.cpanetwork.com/lnk.asp?o=5413&c=918273&a=52861&s1=

i insert it into p202 and add [c1] variable, so it becomes

Code:
http://www.cpanetwork.com/lnk.asp?o=5413&c=918273&a=52861&s1=[COLOR="#FF0000"]|[/COLOR][[c1]][COLOR="#FF0000"]|[/COLOR]&s2=[[subid]]

defining the [c1] variable and the final link for 7search for example looks like this

Code:
http://trackingurl.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=9106&c1=general[COLOR="#FF0000"]%7c[/COLOR]###KEYWORD###[COLOR="#FF0000"]%7c[/COLOR]###AFFID###[COLOR="#FF0000"]%7c[/COLOR]###RID###&t202kw=###KEYWORD###

why am i using | and %7c? all the information is in one field and when i export it into excel, it's in one cell. obviously i need to have each value in a separate cell in order to work with it. that's where | or %7c comes in. after the export from p202, the excel cell might look something like this

Code:
http://www.cpanetwork.com/lnk.asp?o=5413&c=918273&a=52861&s1=[COLOR="#FF0000"]|[/COLOR]general[COLOR="#FF0000"]|[/COLOR]bid keyword[COLOR="#FF0000"]|[/COLOR]76937[COLOR="#FF0000"]|[/COLOR]64720[COLOR="#FF0000"]|[/COLOR]&s2=1127

the only thing i need to do then is to use an excel function text to columns and choose | as a separator. then i have separate cells for: adgroup, bid keyword, partner id1 and partner id2.

and why |? i simply chose this separator, because dash (or underscore) couldn't be used as many networks' partners are defined as xxx-sss_xxx and | seemed to me unique enough, so i decided to use it. and why am i using %7c? it's a code in url that translates into | when processed. while testing i noticed that for some networks when i used | everywhere the link couldn't be translated into a proper url. i have no idea why exactly and it actually didn't matter to me. the current setting has been working the way i wanted. until now.

do you think there might be an issue with the way i'm trying to track things? if so, do you have any suggestion what i can change/improve? how do you track things with p202? or are you using cpv lab instead?

any suggestion would be deeply appreciated!
 
MI
Back