If you do any kind of PPC marketing, you likely swear by the importance of tracking your sales to the keyword and placement level. Currently, I’m using a free software package called Prosper 202 for most of my tracking. For the most part, it works alright, though there are a number of things I’d like to see improved. However, at the price, I’m not complaining. I also have Stats Junky, which I’m working on getting integrated with Nanacast, but its not there yet.

So for now, we’re dealing with Prosper 202, and today we’re going to talk about how to use it with Nanacast.

At the moment, Nanacast doesn’t have a .csv download option for your subids and sales tracking, so there’s really only one way to integrate Prosper 202 with Nanacast, and that is to use their (Prosper’s) tracking pixel. Although this is the only way, it also happens to be the best way, because sales stats are then sent to 202 automatically, in real time.

Thankfully, Nanacast makes it abundantly easy to use tracking pixels, regardless of your tracking software.

From the Merchant’s Perspective

Simply go to the thank you page of your product or membership, and add the line of code that Prosper 202 gives you.

I’ve included a screenshot of the code I’m using below.

As you can see, I’ve modified the code a little bit, to use one of the variables that Nanacast makes available on the thank you page. The {checkout_price} variable sends the full purchase price back to 202 as the value of the transaction – a very handy feature considering that my products all have different price points. Without this feature in place, 202 would get pretty cumbersome, pretty quick.

One thing to note about this is that if you have an upsell on the backend after your initial offer, ONLY the initial offer gets registered in 202. I think this has to do with their only recognizing each cookie once, in an attempt to prevent duplicate results. However, this means you don’t see your upsell values in your 202 reports.

Ok, so our tracking pixel is in place, now all you have to do is send a click & sale through your 202 links and as soon as the customer hits that thank you page, 202 will get pinged with the value of the transaction, and you’ll be able to track it.

As a side note, I’ve discovered that 202 records the sale on the day of the initial click, NOT the day the sale happens. This comes into play a lot more when a portion of your sales comes from the follow up list.

IMPORTANT:

It is important to note that in order to get your 202 codes registered in Nanacast right up front, you really should be directing your traffic through a Nanacast affiliate link prior to landing on your page.

So it the sequence looks like this:

Google > 202 link > Nanacast link > Landing Page > any amount of time > Purchase > Nanacast sends code back to 202.

From An Affiliate’s Perspective

If you’re an affiliate, promoting a Nanacast product, you can do everything I’ve mentioned above in exactly the same way. Nanacast makes it very easy and automated for affiliates to put their own tracking pixels onto the thank you page; something I haven’t seen in many other affiliate programs. Usually you have to talk to the affiliate manager or product owner directly to request this.

So as an affiliate, simply go and create a link campaign, and right in that screen there (Affiliate Promotion > Link Campaigns > Add New Link Campaign) you’re given the option to add 3rd party tracking code. I’m not sure if you can track the transaction value in the same way as the merchant though, you’d have to check with Nanacast on that.

As you can see, Nanacast has made it very easy to integrate these types of tracking codes into their system.

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