Tracking your leads is extremely important when creating your PPC Campaigns. By knowing which keywords are converting for you and which ones are not, is the difference between a highly profitable campaign, and one that you have to throw away. When you join PPC Coach, you get access to a tracking script called PPC Coach Tracker which is pretty good However, for various reasons, I decided not to go with PPC Coach Tracker and I’m currently using Prosper202 to track all my campaigns instead. Prosper202 is the self hosted version of Tracking202.com and is free for you to use. Tracking leads using Prosper is fairly straightforward, but there are a few different ways to approach it.

One way is to give your tracking pixel (created in Prosper) to your Affiliate manager for each offer you are running, and ask them to place the pixel on the confirmation page of that offer. Whenever a lead comes through and completes the offer, your tracking pixel will “fire” and Prosper will show the conversion in your stats. This is a nice method and offers you real-time tracking. The downside is the hassle of always bothering your affiliate manager to place your pixel. Sometimes it can take them awhile for them to do so, and even when they say they’ve placed it, sometimes it still doesn’t fire for whatever reason.

The second way is to use a global postback url. With this method, you can get your postback url from Prosper and if your CPA network supports it, there will be a place for you to enter and save this information. Once this is in place, you get all the benefits of real-time tracking, without the hassle of bothering your affiliate manager. The only negative is, very few CPA networks support it. Of all the networks I’m a member of, only NeverblueAds and Copeac support postback urls.

The third way is the upload your revenue reports manually into Prosper. You won’t have real-time stats doing it this way, but it pretty much always works and you won’t have to rely on someone else. Prosper is somewhat particular in the format of the revenue report which makes it a pain to deal with for certain networks. Basically you need a comma separated file that contains the subids of all the leads that had a conversion. With an affiliate network like Hydra (which is great for PPC Coach btw), getting this report is a snap. All you need to do is click on the reports tab, choose your date range, and select the ‘Show SubIDs’ and ‘Show Actions Only’ checkboxes. Hit Go, and you have a report ready to be uploaded into Prosper directly.

Unfortunately, not all the networks are so easy to deal with. Take FluxAds for example, which is another network I use a lot with my PPC Coach membership. FluxAds allows you to generate a subid report in csv format as well, but as far as I can tell, there’s no way to filter out the non-conversions. If you send a lot of traffic to them, it’s a big pain to open up the file, and delete all the useless entries. So here’s one way to do it using Excel. I’m actually not an Excel expert, so feel free to let me know if there’s an easier way to do this. Open up your exported csv file in Excel. For this FluxAds report, we want to remove all the rows where the Leads column = 0. Then all we need to do is click on the Leads header and go to the Data > Filter > AutoFilter menu item. This will create a little drop down in the Leads cell which you select. Choose “1″ from the dropdown which will filter out all the non 1 rows.

Finally, select this filtered data, copy it to a new sheet, and save it back as a csv file. Now you can upload this filtered csv file into Prosper.

Update: Instead of doing the step above, an easier way is to just select all the subids and paste them directly into Prosper by going to Update > Update Subids.

As you can see, getting your leads into your tracking system is not always easy, but it is very important if you want to be successful with PPC. Take the time to track your leads, even if it’s only manually. PPC Coach emphasizes this and so does Rob from DominateIM. These guys are experts at PPC so you would do well to listen to their advice.

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