How I use P202 for listbuilding

A friend of mine found the following valuable, so I thought it might also be of interest to Warriors. This example applies to Aweber but can be adapted to any similar service. It requires a thank-you page associated with your subscriber form and confirmation page deployed in Aweber.

When I set up a squeeze or opt-in page, I use tracking202 to track my ppc campaigns and set up a dummy affiliate network and campaign to track confirmed opt-ins. The approach lets me see what PPC campaigns, keywords and landers are generating subscribers with all the information I need in one place.

Step by step:

1. Create a dummy affiliate network in t202, I usually name it "lists"
2. Create dummy affiliate campaigns for each Aweber subscription form. The affiliate URL should be your "Thank you" page, the one associated with a subscription form in Aweber, not your list confirmation page. Remember that the T202 subID is going to be passed to that page, so you may need to add a query string. For example, if your thank you page for that form is 'http://example.com/thankyou.html' all you need to do is make the affiliate URL 'http://example.com/thankyou.html?' Likewise if you already use a query string in your thank you page, you need to add subid as the last parameter with an ampersand, so 'http://example.com/page.php?p=10&g=2' becomes 'http://example.com/page.php?p=10&g=2&subid=' I recommend you turn cloaking off.
3. Set up your landing pages. You don't use the outbound tracking URL on the lander, you only need the javascript landing page code. Put the javascript in your lander somewhere. I usually put it right after the body tag.
4. In your Aweber form, replace the direct link to the thank you page with the 'landing page outbound tracking affiliate URL.' Don't worry, the redirect always works regardless of where the visitor to your website came from. T202 will report form submits as clicks.
5. Get your destination URL in T202, using your dummy affiliate network/campaign and associated landing page, set it up as appropriate for your PPC campaign, and obviously test the URL to make sure it works. Never, ever, ever use the "direct link" setup as it'll just push people through to the confirmation page, you don't want that.
6. And now the important part: Select "Get postback/pixel" in t202. I use the unsecured image code. This belongs on your "confirmation success page" you'll find in Aweber under "confirmed opt in." Put the pixel in the body of your HTML, preferably right before the end body tag or right after the beginning body tag.

So, doing all this, you'll see in T202 every time somebody hits your lander, a form submit will track as a clickthrough, and a confirmed opt-in will track as a conversion. This lets you optimize your PPC campaigns for listbuilding and gives you a good handle on your success rates and cost per subscriber. The only minor cavaet is that confirmations won't track in a different browser or on a different computer, but in most cases the confirmation comes from the same browser, and in any event there are mechanisms you can use to reconcile confirmations that didn't track.

You can get more sophisticated with this approach with Aweber hidden fields. For example, you can include subID as a hidden field in your subscription form with a little PHP or Javascript, then you can export your Aweber list and T202 log and marry up who came from where. You could also include keywords as a hidden field and grab subscribers' attention by including their search terms in your email subjects. The tracking ID is also handy for determining what campaigns are adding openers, clickers and converters to your list and what campaigns are cluttering your lists with poor prospects. Passing the subid as a hidden field is also the mechanism you use to record opt-ins that didn't track for whatever reason, generally a rare case.

I believe the implementation described above hasn't been presented elsewhere (the closest I found was a semi-solution to a related problem in the t202 forums) and I offer it in the hopes that members of this forum find it of value.