My name is Christian Little and Luke asked if I would mind putting together this posting for you on how I have been promoting PeerFly offers with 7Search. I am going to show you some stats, some results that I have gotten, and hopefully this will help a few aspiring newbies out there. What I am going to show you will not make you rich, but it will get you going in the right direction.

I think I should preface this by saying I am not a super affiliate or anywhere close to it. I do affiliate marketing casually on the side. I have a full time job and a family that take priority over it. So, what I do is a little different than what other people might tell you to do.

There are two elements I consider to be vital if you are going to be even remotely successful when promoting anything online: Tracking and Testing.

For tracking, I strongly suggest you install Prosper202 somewhere and get very familiar with it. It is a free tracking platform that was built for affiliate marketers and it works extremely well in helping you track the results of everything you do.

For testing, you need to constantly test new ideas, new landing pages, new ad copy, and so on. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that you might find that making a small change to your landing pages will result in a huge jump in conversions (and thus more money to you).

That being said, let me show you what you can do with 7Search, Prosper202, and PeerFly. I will be referring to Prosper202 as P202 for the rest of this posting.

Tracking With Prosper202

First off, you need to make sure that P202 is receiving data from PeerFly. This is called a Postback (they send some information to P202 when you get a conversion). What you need to do is get the Postback URL from P202 via the Setup tab, and modify it slightly so you are using PeerFly’s code for the commission amount and the subid1 variable.

To get the postback URL from P202, click on the Setup tab, then on Get Postback/Pixel. It gives you a few options, but use the Simple Global Post Back URL option, here is what it looks like:

Then you simply login to PeerFly and put the code into the Global Postback page so it looks something like this:

Now whenever you send a click through P202 to any offer in PeerFly and it converts, PeerFly will automatically send some data to you. When combined with the data that you have in P202 from when you sent the visitor through, you can get some very impressive stats.

I am not going to cover how to use P202 in this posting, Luke wanted me to show some of the results I am getting and how I analyze the data, so we are going to move onto how to analyze the results in P202 as that is what I do a lot.

The other key item here to make sure this works properly is to make sure you are passing your P202 subid to PeerFly with every offer into the s1 variable. Otherwise, if you get a conversion, PeerFly will send back the data they have to you but it will not match up because you are not specifying a subid.

A subid in P202 is basically a unique identifier for every individual visitor that you send through. It is critical that you have this mapped properly to the s1 variable unless you want to get a bit more advanced which is not really necessary.

When you add a specific offer from PeerFly into P202 you do it as a Campaign. You enter some basic information and your link that Peerfly gives you, but you have to modify it slightly to pass in the subid variable as the s1 variable to PeerFly. Once you do that, it will map correctly and PeerFly can correctly postback to you.

Here is an example of what it looks like when you set it up:

Example of Using 7Search, Prosper202, and PeerFly

That’s enough of the basics for now. I want to show you a campaign I had running to promote some offers and I will show you data from 7Search, P202, and PeerFly so you can see how it all works together once you have it setup and running properly.

This campaign ran from Tuesday January 29, 2013 until Monday February 4, 2013 (7 days total).

Here are the stats from 7Search for that period for the campaign:

Because 7Search is a pay-per-click network (which is what I focus on, I do not get involved with CPM advertising as a general rule) the two numbers I care about the most are Clicks and Cost. You can see that 7Search sent me 3,367 clicks for a total of $33.67.

Now let’s take a look at the results for that time period. This is from P202 for this specific campaign:

The [No Campaign] line is because I was using landing pages for my test. So, what this report is showing you that I got 3118 clicks tracked, of those 272 clicked through my landing page and 9 converted on Just Hook Up. A further 149 clicked through and went to xxxBlackBook but did not convert.

Now some of the numbers in P202 do not necessarily agree with what 7Search is stating. This is due to numerous reasons, mostly technical stuff about duplicated clicks and such. It is not a big deal in this case, but if you ever see a huge discrepancy in what your ad network is claiming and what you are seeing then you need to call them up and figure out what is going on.

So in short I spent $33.67 at 7Search, but earned $42.75.

Since I had a successful campaign running, the next trick is to optimize it to make it more profitable and there are several ways to do it. Next I am going to show how to do a few basic optimization tactics using all that click data from P202.

Landing Page Optimization

The first thing I look over when trying to optimize a campaign is my landing pages. At the time of this campaign, I had 5 different landing pages running. Here are the stats during this time period:

Now just using that information, you can see that only three of my landing pages managed to generate any conversions during the test period.

#2 and #5 did not generate a single conversion, but #4 did with the same amount of traffic being directed to it. That tells me that either #4 was significantly better or #2 and #5 were significantly worse. Either way, #2 and #5 could be removed from the rotation at this point (which I did when I initially reviewed the data).

Furthermore, you can see that while #1 got the most leads, it also had way more people sent to it (because it was the first lander I built and it ran solo for a while). But if you look at the click-through rate and the signup rate, you can see that it significantly under-performs when compared to #4 and #3. So at this point I took #1 out of the rotation, leaving just #3 and #4 running.

That leaves #3 and #4 being the only landing pages left running at this point because they showed the best results. I then took those landing pages and started testing variations of them and I’m happy to say after this initial campaign I got them up to 25-30% click-through rates on both.

Day-Parting Optimization

The next step that I do when optimizing campaigns is to look at the day parting report in P202 for the campaign. It is found in the Overview tab and here is the data for this campaign:

This report shows you the hours of the day that you got the clicks and what the performance was. It does not take a genius to see that all my conversions happened in the afternoon and evenings (which makes sense as I was promoting dating offers).

Something you may not know is that 7Search has a Campaign Scheduler feature which lets you set the hours of the day that you campaigns will run. You have to call them up and ask them to activate it, but once you get it turned on it can be very useful when you combine it with P202. Here is what it looks like after I did a lot of testing with this campaign (Green means the campaign is running during that time):

The key advantage here is that 7Search will by default try to spread your clicks out throughout the day. But when you set specific hours it can run, you get way more clicks during those specific times which leads to more conversions.

Now, I think I should point out that P202 has another useful report called Week Parting which shows the same information but it is for the days of the week instead of hours of the day. I did not use the report much during this initial campaign, but it is something I strongly recommend doing as a further step.

Referral-Based Optimization

The last optimization tactic I am going to cover today is referral-based optimization. Basically looking at where all these clicks are coming from and blacklisting the bad ones.

You can use the Group Breakdown report in P202 (assuming you are passing along the AFFID and RID variables from 7Search) to identify the specific members of 7Search who are sending you traffic. Here is an example:

 What you want to look for is somebody who sent a lot of clicks but none of them converted, here is an example:

I found a few affiliates in their network like this that I blocked by blacklisting on 7Search. Only block affiliates that send you a good number of clicks that do not convert (i.e. 100+ clicks with no conversions).

That is all I have for now. As a recap, here are some of the key areas you can quickly and easily optimize by learning P202 and using it properly:

• Landing Pages
• Hour of Day / Day of Week
• Specific Referrals Within Ad Networks

There are several other ways to look at the data, but this is an extremely long post already so I will leave it at this for now. Feel free to comment if you have any questions.