Written on March 9, 2009 at 4:38 am by Chase Sagum

Prosper202 – Free Self-Hosted PPC Tracking Application

Marketing, Open Source, Web Tools 4 comments

Prosper202 is a PHP application that you can host on your own server that gives you a tool to track your PPC campaigns. You can track multiple PPC accounts such as your Google Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN adcenter campaigns. What specifically do you track you ask? Well you can track multiple things, but the most important being the tracking of your Top Performing Keywords! The Tracking202 application tells you which keywords are actually making you money and which ones are losing you money. This way you can weed out all the under performing keywords. In other words, with your PPC campaigns you are used to being able to track the following:

1. Ad Impressions
2. Clicks on those impressions

Then you are basically blind from there until the visitor actually hits your website/landing page. Then you are able through analytics and your own calls to action what the visitor does on your site. But what about in between? Of the visitors who actually did what you wanted them to do on your website/landing page, you have no way of telling what keyword they came from. Understand? That’s where this application comes into play!prosper

This is not the only feature Prosper202 has however. There are a few others and I would like to mention those as well. As mentioned on prosper202.com here are a few other features:

Track every PPC network

Most of the current tracking programs out there don’t have nearly as many features as T202. Plus they can only track a few of the bigger PPC networks such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter. With T202, you can track any network, big or small. And unlike PPC networks, T202 tracks clicks in real-time-you see every click as it happens.

EPC Calculator

Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.

Prosper202 Pages

T202 maximizes EPC (Earnings Per Click) calculations. How would you feel if you knew exactly what you needed to bid for a keyword for it to be profitable? Then you could adjust your bids accordingly and turn a profit within seconds. It will tell you your EPC per keyword, per Text Ad, per Referer, per PPC account and much more.

Spy View

Probably everyones’ favorite feature. Spy view is a feature you will only find on T202. With Spy View, you can see real-time actions your visitors make with your ads.

Keyword Cloaking

T202 gives users the ability to cloak their keywords from advertisers and affiliate networks-so all of your top-performing keywords are a secret. Why risk your Affiliate Manager or the Advertiser finding out your best keywords, copying them for their own campaigns, and putting you out of business?bTo be successful at Affiliate Marketing you must track your keywords and they must be cloaked.

Direct Linking or Landing Pages

T202 works with direct linking through PPC campaigns or with your own landing pages. Now you can track whether your campaigns profit more with direct linking or landing pages.

So download this application and give it a shot. You will want to make sure you follow the installation instructions very carefully as this app can be a little tricky to install. I was able to install it on a Dreamhost account without any problems so that is the only host I can currently recommend. Good luck and any feedback on the app would be greatly appreciated. Let me know how it works for you! I will be working with this app for the next several weeks and will have some more information for you guys in the coming weeks!

4 responses to " Prosper202 – Free Self-Hosted PPC Tracking Application"

  1. Bill masson on April 4, 2009:

    This looks quite interesting; I haven’t come across this before. I do know that there are several similar programs out there that do the same job, so whether this program is any better remains to be seen. PPC is a tricky business and a lot of people get their fingers burnt, that being said I will sign up to this download and see what I think of it. If it meets with my expectations then I will gladly give you a mention in my next post.

    Thanks for the links and your insights

  2. photographer on July 3, 2009:

    I do know that there are several similar programs out there that do the same job, so whether this program is any better remains to be seen. PPC is a tricky business and a lot of people get their fingers burnt, that being said I will sign up to this download and see what I think of it. If it meets with my expectations then I will gladly give you a mention in my next post.

  3. Jason (Prosper202 User) on July 17, 2009:

    Chase,

    As a famous tv commercial used to state: “I liked it so much, I…” well I created my own set of analysis tools to compliment the rudimentary reporting that Prosper202 has by default. Don’t get my wrong, I love Prosper202; its just got some shortcomings which I don’t see getting fixed anytime soon, especially in the data analysis department.

    I’d love if you’d provide me your feedback on my free Prosper202 analysis tools. They work by using a uploaded Visitors data export file from Prosper202 (or Tracking202) and use the historical conversion history of a campaign to provide statistical analysis. The results help you refine a negative keyword list, create a dayparting schedule, as well as identify hot key phrases and geo targets. This is all determined by analyzing the conversion history of the campaign you export from P202. They are here: http://www.domainmethods.com/tools/t202

    Thanks in advance!

  4. Pace on July 21, 2009:

    Wait, I thought Google Analytics did this already by default? *goes to check*

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