Technicalities (Tracking/PHP...etc) is my biggest problem

If PPV is the direction you wanna go right now i think Affplaybook would be good for you, never tried them by myself but i knw the focus more on PPV and develop tools for affiliates, on the other hand i just to had STM membership, it was $99 or something , but the info is pure gold, most of the members are regular thread starters, this forum would be great for you if you are more into mobile offers or paypercall and stuff i think

Anyway remember to test for yourself, and good luck

Ahh...well the easiest way is to learn by doing. Install P202 and click on the Setup tab and walk through all the steps it outlines. It's pretty simple. The big thing is any data that you can pass along from your ad network do it through the c1 - c4 variables.

Example, I have a campaign running on adwords right now. Adwords sends all the clicks to this URL:

http://www.domain.com/?t202id=286&t202kw={keyword}&c1={creative}&c2={ifC ontent:Content}{ifSearch:Search}&c3={placement}&c4 =AdGroupName

All those bits of code that are surrounded by { and } are variables that Google will autopopulate.

Breaking it down:

t202kw={keyword} - this passes the keyword the user searched for on Google when they clicked my ad

c1={creative} - this is the ID google assigned to the specific ad

c2={ifContent:Content}{ifSearch:Search} - If the user was on the search network this variable gets set to Search, otherwise it gets set to Content (meaning they were on the content network)

c3={placement} - This is essentially the referrer, but Google shortens it to the told level domain. This is useful because Adwords lets you block domains for your campaigns, so if I get 500 clicks from a domain with no leads I will block them in the campaign.

c4=AdGroupName - This I put in manually, I set the name of the specific ad group because I have several running and this makes it easier to track for me.

Now once some traffic goes through and assuming the conversion beacon is setup, I can do all kinds of stuff with the data.

Here is that specific campaign filtered by the c2 variable (in my case that identifies the Content/Search network):


This is the Group Overview report, you can filter your click data by all the C variables, the keyword variable, referrer, and a bunch of other useful metrics.

That shows you I'm getting 30% less clicks from the Search network but it is converting significantly higher than the Display network. At this point it's all about looking at the data from different angles to figure out what is working and what isn't.

But the key is to make sure you don't jump to the wrong conclusion.

Looking at my Adwords account I can see that the clicks from the content network are costing me $0.40 on average, whereas the search network are costing me $0.81 on average.

Display: 397 clicks, spent $158.80 to get 6 conversions, or $24.47 cost per conversion.

Search: 221 clicks, spent 179.01 to get 12 conversions, or $14.92 cost per conversion.

Looking at that some people would argue that the Search Network is the winner.

Except in this case I'm making $40 CPA so I'm still clearing a profit of $16ish. It's not as great as the $26 profit I'm making off the Search Network, but it's still decent. I'm quite happy with that since it requires none of my attention to keep this campaign going.

Numbers and stats are great, but you have to make sure you aren't misinterpreting the data too.

CPVLab has some extra features that makes it really stand ahead of P202, here's a few that I'm a big fan of:

It is way more user-friendly. When you setup P202 you have to spend a bunch of time clicking around trying to figure out what to do. CVPLab is way more intuitive in getting things started.

It has a campaign optimizer module which will basically look at all your click data and make recommendations on changes to make. This is brilliant and it's very well done. Furthermore, if you are using multiple landing pages I believe it gives you an option to let it turn landing pages on/off automatically based on this data which is absolutely awesome.

It's basically makes it easier to manage your campaigns. Is it necessary? Absolutely not. But if you don't know alot about statistics or don't feel comfortable looking at a big table of numbers and how to interpret the data, they take that out of your hands and do it for you.

Honestly, if you are just getting started, IMO save the money and just start with a free solution like prosper202. This will get you learning the basics behind tracking and everything.

Once you start making money, then maybe consider upgrading to cpvlab