Hey everyone… first of all, sorry to those whose comments were held in queue so long.  I’ve had so much on my plate the last few weeks that I just plain forgot to check!!  You’ve all been approved now and I’ll give them a look and respond shortly.

But now for something completely different…

You may or may not know about Tracking202.  It’s a very slick tracking & reporting system released a few months back.  I wasgiven an early preview of it and I was totally impressed… the one major obstacle I had to using it, that I knew a ton of other people would have too, was that it was hosted on their servers, not your own.  This has the paranoia issue of trusting your data (and from what I saw of how it worked, ALL your data… every keyword, every link, every campaign, EVERYTHING) to people you didn’t know, in a small company where let’s face it, things can happen.

But the bigger issue to me was that now my campaigns have yet another server in the loop.  Already there’s our own server that hosts the landing page, plus the CPA network’s server, plus the advertiser/merchant’s server, and possibly others as well, in the chain.  I really didn’t want yet another potential point of failure.

Well today’s my lucky day… because Prosper202 has been released into the wild!!  Basically it’s tracking202, but you host it on your own server.  I’ve only just installed it and am looking it over now, but so far it looks identical in every way to the Tracking202 system I was so thoroughly impressed with.

Oh, and the price?  That’s the real shocker… call it reverse sticker shock if you will, but it’s FREE!!!  That’s right.  Zero, zip, nada, zilch.  No cashola!  I don’t know how these guys are affording their San Francisco rent, but I hope they can do so for a very long time.

Now I have to put it through its paces.  So far the only downside is one I’m not surprised by and can live with - the code is Zend encrypted.  I know this is important, heck even LPGen is encrypted (though I chose not to use Zend).  But being someone who likes to hack stuff to fit my needs better, I was just the tiniest bit bummed about this.

So, I’m going to run a few campaigns through this baby and let you know how it goes.  I’m really excited though, I’m a sucker for clean detailed visual reporting, and I’m sick of staring at rows of numbers in Excel!

Jonathan

P.S.

Forgot to mention… they’ve also got an Affiliate Marketing Forum as well as  an Affiliate Marketing Blog, both of which may be worth hanging out in from time to time!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.