Prosper202 First Impressions

Tracking202 was an online tool to help you track you keyword and campaign performance with pay per click. The main drawback was you needed to host you data on their site.

Problem solved; Prosper202 is a version of Tracking202 that you host yourself. Cool, so let's dive in.

What is Prosper 202?

The applications within Propser202 started development in late 2007 with a few bytes of code that were designed to help track a few PPC campaigns over mutiple different accounts.

What I want Prosper202 to be: Something I can upload my sale stats from affiliates into and also my paid keyword stats from adwords into and be able to clearly see how I'm profiting or where I'm losing.

Installation

A breeze, the tech guys made this step real easy and equate it to installing wordpress. I did have to set my ftp client to "binary" but after that it was effortless.

Ease Of Use - Documentation

This is a real shortcoming of Prosper202. The ONLY tutorials I could find are in video format and need you to download Divx (with potential toolbars etc.) to watch the tutorials.

Even after downloading Divx my Firefox install would not play the videos.

So I'm up the creek basically, left to stumbling around the program guessing what I'm supposed to be doing. I couldn't even find a "quick start guide" or high level understanding of how it works.

Prosper202 Target Audience

Steven, one of the staff, says the software is geared at all marketers however I found it highly slanted towards CPA marketers.

Personally I pay to send traffic to direct product urls or categories at merchants, sometimes testing 100 or 200 products at once to see which are profitable or have traffic.

To set this up in prosper202 would take many hours just to test one campaign, manually entering the affilaite url for each product.

Another drawback is you need to know the payout up front, which obviously isn't possible with product marketing because visitors may buy multiple quantities or add additional items added to the shopping cart after the purchase.

However, if you are running CPA campaigns this might be a great tracking tool for you as you deal with only 1 url and 1 payout.

How To Get Your PPC Data Into Prosper202

The Biggest Bummer which I learned after making the video is you don't actually ever import your adwords/msn/etc csv data into Prosper202.

Instead you put your Max CPC and it assumes you pay this for every click.

By not using real and accurate data this obviously keeps this tool from being used to make real business decisions.

Hope For The Future

Steven and Wes seem like great folks behind Prosper202 and I hope the tool improves. I was slightly disappointed that i can't use it for much right now but I think it has loads of potential.

However don't let this prevent you from downloading and kicking the tires, you might find it's exactly what you needed.

What Would Make Me Use Prosper202?

I would like to be able to upload my sales stats and paid keyword stats and get reports with real data.

For tracking urls I would like a real easy import to upload multiple affiliate urls with an import.

Go check it out: Prosper202 (it's FREE) and if you have any experience yourself or I got something wrong please share it in the comments ;)

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