This is a guest post by Ross Gordon. Ross has been a huge help to Tracking202 team, even from the earliest of days before we were even launched. Ross heads the blog over at phpBay Pro Tips, which helps people make money on the Ebay Publisher Network using phpBay. Ross has helped share ideas on building the Prosper202 products and applications, he has helped promote and he is also responsbile for creating the text on the Tracking202 homepage, and the Tracking202 about us page. Ross is sharing some tips on the Export202 product which he uses to scale his campaigns, Export202 can be accessed online at export202.com, or it is also avaliable in the self-hosted version of any Prosper202 installation. Thanks Ross for your help, and without further ado here is Ross' guest blog post.

I use Export 202 all the time to scale my campaigns across the three major networks. I typically start a campaign on Google, and after optimizing it there, I use Export 202 to bring that same campaign to Yahoo and MSN.

While Export 202 is an amazing tool that will save you hours of time, there are still a few things you should remember to do along the way, especially when exporting to Yahoo.

First, while Export 202 does translate Google campaigns to Yahoo, it does not create new URLs for each ad. So when you transfer the Google campaign to Yahoo, it will still be tracking clicks as Google, and that will screw up your metrics and will make your reporting much less valuable.

So you will need to create a new URL as you normally would. Select the same ad that you were using in Google, only make sure to use Yahoo has the search engine. Now go to your CSV file of the new Yahoo version of the campaign and find the ad you want to change, then copy the old URL and find & replace it using the new URL. Do this for all your ads (may take a little time if you have a lot of different ads).

Next, I make sure my bids are right. I have noticed that after I export a Google campaign that sometimes the yahoo version has a two bid prices in the CSV (even if I had content network disabled). There have been times when Yahoo used the bid from the content network as the bid for the search network. So I had all $0.05 bids. It’s no big deal if you have a few ad groups. But when you have 1000 changing manually in Yahoo is not an option. So I make sure to do a find & replace to make the low bid prices be what I want.

Another thing I like to do is lower all my bids from what they were in Google. Yahoo traffic tends to be cheaper (not always) so I like to drop my bids by 5-10 cents to start on cheaper keywords and $.50- $1.00 on expensive keywords. But test for yourself and see if your niche is cheaper on Yahoo.

The last thing I do is I add the negative keywords manually to the account or campaign level since I noticed that I tend to get error messages when I upload the CSV with the negative keywords. You want to make sure you don’t forget to do this or you could lose a good amount of cash.

That’s pretty much it. After that your campaign should be ready to roll.

If you guys sent me the required info, Yahoo will get in touch you with you guys shortly whenever they can. If they don't contact you within a week, please email me again so that I may follow up with Yahoo regarding getting you guys that Gold Account.

Normal Conditions

While talking to some users, apparently some things came to my attention that obviously should NOT be there. The regular standard in general for all Yahoo users who wants Gold Accounts is you must spend $1500 in one month or at least of $500 per month for three consecutive months before you qualify. You would then need to request for the Gold Account.

The Deal

The deal 202 got with Yahoo was if you do $200/month, you would get an Gold Account. If you didn't already do $200/month on Yahoo but you did so on Google or elsewhere and can prove it, they'll work with you to get the Gold Account and many have already gotten their Gold Account approved shortly having Yahoo called.

The Issue

However this isn't the case with everyone. One user told me Yahoo called and talk to them and told them they can only get a Gold Account after spending $2500/month. This is total and utter bull because that's more than the standard itself. If you've contacted me and Yahoo called you, and told you something else than what I've written here today, please email me again and let me know what happened. I'll call Yahoo myself and get things resolved because it is not cool for them to tell me one thing and you guys another. I sincerely apologize if Yahoo did otherwise.

We want showcase 2 user submitted pieces of content! Justin Rumpf has shared with everyone an auto post-back url script for Prosper202 users. This will automatically update your subids for some of the offers you run on networks that allow post back urls.

And thanks to Neil Turner for finding how to get around a facebook error, because sometimes using Tracking202 links with Facebook, Facebook doesn't like the URLs we give it. Neil has found a-way-around this.

#1: Justin's Post-Back URL Script

You can find Justin's auto post-back script here.

#2: Neil's Facebook Trick (copied from forum) - source

"Hey, If anyone has tried using proser202 to track facebook campaigns you may have noticed you get an invalid URL by facebook when you try to use the link that proser 202 generates. There is a simple work around to get it working. When you set up your landing page in prosper202 make sure your use the full url including the extact page you are sending people to. So instead of writting:

www.somesite.com

write:

www.somesite.com/index.php

Now when you get your link facebook will except it. For some reason they do not allow links in the following format: www.somesite.com/?sumphp=bla but they will accept it as www.somesite.com/index.php?sumphp=bla Hope that was clear." - Neil Turner

UPDATE: We need a response by the 6th at the latest or else the free ticket will expire. Please respond ASAP. Thanks.

Ok to make this truly randomly, we used PHP to help us determine the winners of the ASE pass giveaway. The script takes 1000 votes and then each vote is randomly given to a user. The two users with the most votes will win the free passes to ASE.The top voted user will receive the Free EXPO pass, and the user with the 2nd most amount of votes will receive the Full Pass to ASE. We have included the official contest php code snippet below that will determine the winners!

<?  
$lucky[1]["name"] = "Neil";
$lucky[2]["name"] = "Wes Moehlenbruck";
$lucky[3]["name"] = "Ross";
$lucky[4]["name"] = "Jamie Shiller";
$lucky[5]["name"] = "Scott";
$lucky[6]["name"] = "Jason";
$lucky[7]["name"] = "Greg";

for ($i = 0; $i < 1000; $i++) { 
    $num = rand(1,7);    
    $lucky[$num]["votes"]++;
}

foreach( $lucky as $key => $row ) {
    printf("%s received %s votes <br/>", $row["name"],  $row["votes"]);
}  
?>

Below is the winners the PHP script randomly selected, this script was only ran once to determine the winners.

Neil received 140 votes
Wes Moehlenbruck received 153 votes
Ross received 130 votes
Jamie Shiller received 146 votes
Scott received 137 votes
Jason received 166 votes
Greg received 128 votes

And the winners are!

• Jason wins the Expo Pass with 166 votes
• and Wes Moehlenbruck wins the Full Pass having the 2nd most amount of votes, with 153 votes

For those who won please email Steven to get your free pass. Thanks to everyone who participated. Sorry if you lost this contest, as they say better luck next time, but really, we do appreciate all the testimonials you submitted and it means a lot to us. Thank you!

We wanted to do a quick blog post and shout out our appreciation to everyone who donated. Thanks for helping out and supporting 202! You guys are awesome!

Paul Bourque of Uber Affiliate

Norman Janssen of Marketing DAO

Jacob Petrovich of Indoor Sports

Zaviaer Flowers

If you're interesting in helping out and supporting 202 as well, you can help donate to our cause.