Tracking is an important part of affiliate marketing. The more data you have to analyze, the greater your ROI is going to be. The best way to do tracking is to have a script installed that allows you to safely analyze your keywords and ad copies while protecting them from preying eyes.

Custom Script

An ideal solution would be to have your own custom script created and installed on your servers. It’s custom, so it has everything you need and nothing you don’t. For many beginning affiliate marketers, it can be tough to fork out the cash to have something like this built.

Wouldn’t a free solution be nice?

Tracking202

Tracking202 is a free solution to tracking. It works great and is very easy to use. It’s major downfall, however, is that the script is hosted on their servers. This means that they could technically steal your keywords from you. I find this unlikely, but several people on the WickedFire forums seem to be worried about it.

After doing some digging around, it sounds like they are planning to monetize the service in the future. They are doing what they call the “Google business model” of offering a free service (in Google’s case it was that great search engine of their’s) that will build up a loyal user base. Once they do this, Tracking202 hopes to put up some advertising and run referral programs from different affiliate networks.

If this doesn’t sound viable, you aren’t alone. Tracking202’s FAQ page is filled with promises that they won’t be looking at your data. It is obviously the number one concern with the product.

Step in Prosper202 

Prosper202After all these concern, Tracking202 came out with a self-hosted solution called Prosper202. It works the same as Tracking 202 and has the same features. The only difference is that you host it on your on server instead of on their’s.

Keywords are safe now, right? Well technically, they could be sending the information to themselves and storing it in their own database, but I find this very unlikely. They did scramble all of the code so who knows what is actually going on.

I have installed Prosper202 on my server and will be giving it a try. It seems promising and it should help me increase my ROI. I’ll let you know how it works.

A note on the installation…

They say you have to put it on your own domain, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I am using hostgator and created a new subdomain for the tracking script and it is working fine.

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