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So, I constantly get asked this by clients – How do you keep track of all your campaigns? Now, lots of people I know use databases and pages of Excel sheets they are constantly updating. Well, maybe its a thorn in my efficiency, but I just don’t get too excited looking at pages of numbers on a spreadsheet – I’m also not one of those guys running thousands of campaigns on PoF, either, so maybe I just don’t need it. But, some of my easiest ways to track multiple campaigns and multiple ads are by simply using subid/keyword/variable tracking in CPVLab.

In Prosper202 you can have  up to 5 different variables you can track with the use of keyword=, c1=, c2, c3, and c4 fields. In CPVLab, you can have an infinite amount of these extra fields to track with, which is why I much prefer it. Anywho, one of the best suggestions I can give you is to date your ads and campaigns, and pass the date along in the keyword or variable fields. This way when I see that an ad I made a week ago in tracking is starting to fail, I know exactly what date I made the campaign. In my traffic source, the name of the campaign is dated allowing me to simply look it up. This is useful for places like Facebook or PoF when you are constantly testing new images and batches of ads.

Some other useful things I always pass on in the campaign names, ads and variable fields? Campaign/offer name, image/banner number, ad copy number, group number (say for example if I have 100 images, 3 ad copies and I wanted to break them up into 20 ads per group, I would have 15 groups of ads). Passing this all through the subid/variable fields makes it easier for me to just set up an offer and track it across multiple traffic sources without having to setup a new link for each. Of course no one is stopping you if you want to do that. Depending on the amount of ads you are making, and traffic from each network, it would be better to do that.

How do you guys make tracking ads more simple for you? Everyone has their own method, and I’d love to hear them!