Thanks to Think Visibility I have been slightly more active in affiliate marketing – this has inevitably meant tracking where my traffic is coming from, where it is going to, and most importantly what keywords are making or breaking a campaign.
When I first joined ppccoach and cpvcoach (formally called ppvcoach) I was treated (or so I thought) to trackers that would be able to track all of my campaigns. Both trackers would check to make sure that a valid monthly subsciption had been paid for. Both trackers had been encoded because people had been removing the protection, however just looking at the database tables it’s easy to see that it has been badly designed – even for a novice in database design. Add to that the tracker that comes with ppc coach has reporting that is so slow you might as well go and have a cup of tea before the graphs have finished rendering. If you join cpvcoach, you’ll find a dead forum (only a few members are active), and a buggy, unsupported tracker. Other xxxcoach bashing can be found here and here. Rant over.
A great tracker that I have been using can be found at tracking202.com. What makes this tracker great is that it is open source and amazing support – so many people use this tracker. There is a very active forum, and supporters that watch twitter for people having issues. Although it is great however, I want something a bit more. Something a bit more special. Tracking202 doesnt do everything I want, therefore I have started to code my own from scratch.
My features for a dream tracker would start with:
- Open source
- Outstanding support
- Pixel tracking and subid updloading for tracking conversions
- Fast loading of reports
- Plugin system for reports and other features (something similar to wordpress)
- A way of rotating between offers from different networks
- Optional subid tracking – many “inhouse” affiliate programs dont support subid tracking
- An easy intuative way of generating links with different options dependant on the selected traffic source.
All of these I have either nearly finished coding, or completed in the tracker I am currently using – I’ll post some screen shots soon.
What features would you want in your dream tracker?