So now I can create campaigns for offers, landing pages, offer rotations and landing page rotations.  I’ve only really tested sending traffic directly to offers, but I’ve only got one real report (and that is still not 100% finished).

Here is the report for anyone that is interested.

Although the major three search engines have apis for their PPC engines, PPV engines do not.  This brings up the question of how to track the cost of each impression.

To get accurate stats I could scrape the reports that are available in each of the engines, and I guess this would be the best and most accurate way of doing it.  However to begin with, my tracker can hold average click costs per traffic source per campaign.  As impressions are made the current click cost is looked up from the relevant traffic source and recorded with the click. I’ll likely implement some kind of scraping code later on when I have got more of the other essential features implemented.

What I would really really like is if each engine could pass the click cost back to the tracker in the url, and my tracker could handle this easily with a bit of configuration, but it is very unlikely to be implemented.

Since I had a few more ideas for features, and the progress of coding my dream tracker is going quite well I thought I’d post an update.

Here are a few more features that I’ll be adding in the coming weeks:

1. The ability to create ads so that the reports can show which ones are performing well.  Prosper already does this, but at the moment there is no support for adding pictures, and as platforms like facebook, myspace and the new plenty of fish platform use pictures I thought it would be a good idea to add this in.
2. The ability to add campaigns that use dayparting.  This would work a bit like the offer rotation execpt it would use mysql’s date functions to determin which offer to show.  This would enable offers to be show only between specific times, after specific dates, on specific days of the week…. the dayparting would only be limited by what mysql can do with dates.

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:

1. Open source
2. Outstanding support
3. Pixel tracking and subid updloading for tracking conversions
4. Fast loading of reports
5. Plugin system for reports and other features (something similar to wordpress)
6. A way of rotating between offers from different networks
7. Optional subid tracking – many “inhouse” affiliate programs dont support subid tracking
8. 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?

I’ve recently been getting requests from people using the contact form on my blog network small collection of blogs offering to get my sites to page 1 of google.  Here are the emails:

Contact name: Robert Karlson
Contact email: robertkarlson3333@gmail.com

Internet Marketing Services

We would like to get your website on first page of Google.

All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.
Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal.

The following email came from seo.sales.traffic@gmail.com though they say that their page is www.google.com – a little white lie me thinks.

Felicia Sams (http://www.google.com) wrote:
We are interested to increase traffic to your website, please get back to us in
order to discuss the possibility in further detail.

I wonder if their ethical white hat techniques that will not get the sites banned or penalised include using xrumer or other automated contact form spamming software.  I wouldnt have thought so, looking at their emails they look very professional.  What do you think?