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From Xtreme Conversions Support Desk

Contents 1 Introduction 2 What Xtreme Conversions is All About 2.1 The Big Idea 2.2 Writing Ads that get users to click 2.3 Converting Traffic To Make Sales and Increase ROI 2.4 Writing Copy That Sells Your Products 2.5 Quality Product 3 How Xtreme Conversions Works 3.1 How it All Works 3.2 Using Xtreme Conversions with Pay per Click Traffic 3.3 What if I am tracking conversions for my own product? 4 Installing Xtreme Conversions 5 Basic Usage Scenarios (lading pages and direct linking) 5.1 Basic Usage Scenarios (lading pages and direct linking) 5.1.1 Landing page model 5.1.2 Direct Linking 5.2 How can you test that the tracking is working? 6 Advanced Usage Scenarios ( Squeeze Pages, Wordpress Blogs and Others) 6.1 Using Squeeze Pages and Wordpress Blogs with Xtreme Conversions 6.2 Passing Tracking Info To Aweber 6.3 Tracking for Word Press Blogs, and Multiple Entry sites 6.4 WP Blog Setup 7 Tracking Sales and Optins 7.1 Recording Sales and Optins 8 Tracking Segmentation 9 Uploading Sales Data 10 Reports and making the most of them 10.1 Reports and making the most of them 10.2 Old Reports 10.3 Search By Tid 10.4 Sales Data tab 10.5 Performing Keywords 10.6 Non Performing Keywords 10.7 Optin Reports 11 Get Code options in depth 11.1 Get Code options in depth 11.2 Campaign 11.3 Adname 11.4 Default Keyword 11.5 Domain 11.6 Use Curl 11.7 Page Type 11.8 Single Entry 11.9 Multi Entry 11.10 Use Direct Linking 11.11 frame redirect 11.12 Affiliate Link 12 Useful Resources 12.1 Wealthy Affiliate 12.2 Pay Per Click Formula 12.3 LPGen 12.4 Speed PPC 12.5 Link Cloaking Software 12.6 Hosting and VPS 13 Troubleshooting and FAQ 14 Getting Help And Support 15 Appendix A

[edit] Introduction

Dear Customer

My name is Amir Darwish, the principal developer of Xtreme conversions.

I want to thank you for buying what my customers repeatedly tell me is the best solution on the market for keyword tracking.

I am constantly developing and updating our software with more of our xtreme ideas – so pop by the Forum from time to time for any update notices – or contact our support desk and they will be happy to point you to any upgrades that may be availible.

Xtreme Conversions will revolutionize the way you do affiliate and pay per click marketing. You’ll be able to build more profitable campaigns faster and you’ll be able to eliminate costs on ineffective advertising.

Xtreme Conversions is flexible enough to fit any design or site setup you can imagine, and it will be reliable in capturing the data you need most with no problems.

In order to harness the power of XC, you need to spend a bit of time understanding it and working with it. XC is not a push-button solution. Some of its features are a bit more advanced, and require some understanding of web technologies.

I hope you find this instructional manual simple and easy to follow. I recommend giving this manual and accompanying tutorial videos a couple of hours of your time – it will result in less frustrating guesswork and muddling-through for you.

If you have any problems or questions, please consult the troubleshooting chapter, the forum and then, if you really get stuck, we have a help desk with dedicated staff. I monitor the help desk myself, and if there are any particularly complex questions you have I will personally attend to them.

However, most questions will be answered by our staff who have been extensively trained in using and troubleshooting the Xtreme Conversions Software.

I hope your experience with our software is a pleasurable one.

Sincerely, Amir Darwish

Ps. The user/pass for the software is 123/123

[edit] What Xtreme Conversions is All About

[edit] The Big Idea

If you’re even remotely familiar with Pay Per Click marketing, you’ll understand the basic premise of the profitability formula.

In order to run profitable pay per click campaigns you need the following essential factors in place.

1. An ad which entices many users to click on it.

2.Conversion of that ad traffic into customers.

3.A proper pre-sell strategy (unless you’re direct linking)

4.A Quality Product

If these points are not all in place, you’ll be leaving a lot of money on the table.

First, I want to make an important note. These points can **not** be strung together without doing proper market research. Understanding customer needs, frustrations and behaviour is essential.

Pay Per Click isn’t a lazy man’s game. It takes hard work. But once mastered, the rewards and passive income generated from Pay Per Click marketing can be tremendous, so be patient and don’t expect immediate returns.

[edit] Writing Ads that get users to click

How do you write ads that get users to click?

This question is outside the scope of this guide, so we’ll run through it quickly by illustrating in what ways XC can help you do this.

As a general rule, for your ad to get a good CTR (click through rate) you’ll need to make it targeted and relevant.If you’re writing an ad targeting puppy owners, for example, you have to use their language and it has to be relevant to their needs. It has to provide them with some sort of value or something they want. If they typed a search phrase into a search engine then that search phrase better be relevant to the ad that appears. If its not, it doesn’t conform to what they’re looking for, and you’re CTR will be lower.

So how does Xtreme Conversions help you with the process of writing targeted and relevant ads?

Xtreme Conversions will tell you the exact phrase that the user typed into the search engine box to reach your ad. It will also tell you which website they came from if they did not come from a search engine.

How does this help you?

It helps you make more targeted ads, and to break your ads into smaller, tighter and more targeted adgroups as well as eliminating keywords that have nothing to do with your ad or product, curiosity keywords and so on.

[edit] Converting Traffic To Make Sales and Increase ROI

This is where Xtreme Conversions is the best at and what it was designed for.

With Xtreme Conversions, you’ll find out that some keywords simply don’t convert, others are mediocre and some just make you sales time and again.. You can consult the “performing keywords” and the “non-performing keywords” tabs which make lists of what keywords you should look at discarding and which ones you should keep. You now have an advantage over 99.9% of marketers who will never get access to this mission-critical information.

What do you need to do to start the process of generating performing keywords?

You have to brainstorm a list of keywords in the beginning. There are many tools (both free and paid) that allow you to do this. I use Keyword Elite , but there are less effective free tools such as the overture suggestion tool . Once you have your keyword list and have placed ads on the ad networks with those keywords, XC will help you refine the list by tracking good and bad keywords and displaying them as mentioned above.

[edit] Writing Copy That Sells Your Products

Writing a winning sales page (your landing page, usually the first page your visitors see) is highly dependent on doing proper research. You need to push the buttons that makes your target market tick. What problems are they facing, what language are they using, what word choices are they making? You need to be intimately familiar with all that in order to maximize your conversions.

In short, give your customers what they want.

XC will show you the exact words that people typed into the search engines to bring a list of result that led to your page. Now wouldn’t it be brilliant if your landing page was consistent with the keywords they typed in? Your sales page would then be super relevant and would be tailored more to what they work looking for.

Xtreme Converions helps you to do this. It allows you to put a piece of code on your site in places where you want the users search keyword to appear. You can choose to enter them in your page title, in your header, or in your body as many times as you'd like.

At the time of writing this, there is also a fine piece of software that was just launched that will take this concept and blow it up many-fold. The software is called LPGen (landing page generator). I am not sure how long it will remain on the market for, but its here:

[edit] Quality Product

This is the last factor in our formula. Again this factor is nothing different from the previous factors in that it highly depends on research. You really can't tell whether a product is a winner or not until you've researched the product. It's wise to identify a number of products for your niche and alternate between them to see which ones convert best for you.

One useful tool in researching product is AdSpyPro. That tool allows you to perform competitive intelligence. You load up a number of keywords and then see which ads are running for those keywords day in and day out. Those ads will point to products. If you consistently see those products being advertised in the search engines, that's a good sign that product is being bought and is of relatively high quality.

Obviously , you will have to do extensive research to find the best product in the field – don’t settle for one and presume it’s the most profitable.

For more in depth information about writing sales pages that sell and other Pay Per Click related matters, I highly recommend the Wealthy Affiliate eBook. It explains what I have explained here in a lot more detail – and is a whole field of study rather than a short description.

There are other very useful resources that are found in the resources section, but by far, Wealthy Affiliate is the best of them.

[edit] How Xtreme Conversions Works

[edit] How it All Works

It’s critical that you understand this “bird’s eye view” of how Xtreme Conversions Tracks data as a user passes through the search engine onto your site.

I have tried to keep the explanation simple.

If you're not technically inclined, you may need to read this section a couple of times over to understand it, but it's by no means complicated or difficult to grasp.

Traffic comes to your site from an array of sources. Some of them could be :

• Pay Per Click Traffic from Google, MSN, Yahoo and others This can be ad traffic from search engines or it can also be contextual traffic, or traffic from ads on other sites on the Google content network.

• SEO traffic – this is traffic coming from the natural search engine listings – not ads.

• JV partners through promotional emails.

• Links to your site from various websites

• Other sources

Let's see how XC enables you to track those sources of traffic.

First, a piece of either PHP or Javascript code is embedded in your landing page. This code enables XC to do its job. Embedding of the code in your pages is simple and is covered in the configuration chapters.

[edit] Using Xtreme Conversions with Pay per Click Traffic

Here’s how it works.

1. You get traffic from search engine advertising.
2. That traffic hits your landing page .
3. Xtreme Conversions analyzes information about your visitors behaviour that's normally hidden from you. XC does this automatically; you don't need to do anything.
4. Xtreme Conversions identifies what keywords the user typed into the search engine and what domain they came from. yahoo.com, google.com would be examples.
5. Xtreme Conversions associates that traffic to a campaign and ad name that you entered into your Xtreme Conversions administration panel. This is tracked either by the landing page code or a dynamically created link for emails or other direct linking purposes.
6. Xtreme Conversions records the visitor's traffic information in the database and generates a unique identifier that can be used to pull up the traffic record from database into useful reports in the administration panel. We're going to call that unique identifier the tracking id from now on.
7. Note: That unique identifier is unique on the campaign level, the ad name level, and the domain level.So if you get a click for the term: dog training from two separate domains, each click is going to have its own unique identifier. You'll understand the power of this distinction later on.
8. Xtreme Conversions will take this tracking id and place it in a cookie in the visitor's browser. A cookie doesn’t violate people privacy or spy on them - it's just a way for the program to keep track of the visitor and where they came from originally, especially if they decide to leave your website and come back later. It’s a way of protecting this information and also a way to pass this information to other pages that you have on your site.
9. Xtreme Conversions will then enable you to take that tracking id and append it to the end of your affiliate link. (Very easy to do). In this way, you will be able to track sales on other affiliate sites.
10. All of the above steps happen at lightening speed, and the slow-down in your sites responsiveness is negligible.

So what we have as a result of all these steps are the following:

- We've identified where the user came from
- We've added that information to our database 
- We've generated a unique tracking id specific for that visitor and his source of traffic
- We've taken that id and added it to a cookie as well as added it to our affiliate links

Here's how the process continues:

1. The user clicks on your affiliate link and is redirected to the merchant
2. The merchant receives the tracking id that was appended to the affiliate link
3. Once the visitor buys or performs an action, the merchant records the tracking id as part of the sales record
4. Once you access your sales data you download the sales information including the tracking ids that generates the sales.
5. You take that information and upload it in XC.
6. XC will record the number of sales generated by each tracking id and pull the records that correspond to those tracking ids, allowing you to identify the source of traffic that generated the sales for you.

Note: These steps pre-suppose that the merchant you're dealing with supports tracking ids. Most reputable affiliate and CPA networks do indeed support tracking ids. If they don't then it's not possible to track at the keyword level, whether you use XC or any other solution for that matter.

[edit] What if I am tracking conversions for my own product?

This last section is slightly different if you're tracking your own products. What happens in that case is that you place a small snippet of code in your thank you page. This snippet of code, reads the cookie and records in the XC database directly that a sale occurred through a particular tracking id.

What you'll find to be true in sales and conversion is that it's mostly a numbers game. Each source of traffic will convert at a specific rate. Barring any other contextual factors, this conversion rate will not vary too much for each traffic source. So your job is to identify that rate and focus on the traffic sources that have high conversion rates.

Now, please note, the process is the same for all traffic sources. XC detects where the traffic originated from, whether it came through a keyword search in the search engine, through a banner ad you placed on another site, through a link exchange you did, or through an email that was sent. XC will record and track all that information for you to evaluate and see which of it is effective and which is not.

Let's summarize the whole thing.

1. A visitor clicks on your link
2. XC detects where the visitor came from, records the info in the database and generates a unique tracking id
3. That tracking id is added to your affiliate link
4. The user clicks on your affiliate link and buys
5. The merchant records the tracking id along w/ the sale
6. You download your sales stats and upload them in XC
7. XC reports exactly which sources of traffic led to sales being generated.

Again, it would be good to read this section a couple of times to understand it well.

[edit] Installing Xtreme Conversions

There are two modes of installs, an automated web install that I highly recommend for everyone, and a manual install.

The web install only fails if you enter a field wrong. It's been tested for hundreds of installations. So if you have a problem with it, either the fields were not entered properly, or your server is not compatible with or will not accept an automatic installation.

To access the web install follow the install link on the download page you were sent when you purchased XC.

To access the files to do a manual install, follow the download link on the member's page.

For your convenience, I’ll include the manual installation instructions here:

1. Extract the zip file and upload the resulting files into a new folder on your server. Try and use the root folder to house your installation folder if you can – such as public_html or htdocs. Our technical team uses the folder public_html/xtreme3 or htdocs/xtreme3 if you buy the professional installation - so create and use that folder if you can.
2. Create a MYSQL database on your server. This is usually done via your control panel.
3. Open up the constants.php file in notepad. Fill in your database name , username , password , domain , FTP username and password in the appropriate slots.
4. Run www.yourdomain.com/xtreme3/install.php once
5. Login to your installation at www.yourdomain.com/xtreme3/ with the default username 123 and default password 123.

For more info on the manual installation – see the readme inside the Xtreme Conversions zip that you received.

Additionally there are a couple of videos showing how to create a database, and how to perform the web install, as well as a quick start guide that covers the installation process fairly well. Please watch them first.

The automated install creates a folder called xtreme3 and places all the necessarily files in it. The default user/pass is 123/123, to modify it open the file login.php in the xtreme3 folder and scroll all the way towards the bottom. You’ll see two fields for the username and password - modify them as you wish.

[edit] Basic Usage Scenarios (lading pages and direct linking)

[edit] Basic Usage Scenarios (lading pages and direct linking)

In this chapter we'll cover the most common uses of Xtreme Conversions: • Track landing pages with affiliate links • Direct linking campaigns.

There is an important point that I'd like you to understand. The code generated for Xtreme Conversions is PHP or Javascript code. PHP and Javascript code is different from HTML code. HTML code is processed by the browser - Firefox, or Internet Explorer , and produces the website that you see. PHP code on the other hand is processed by the server. That means you should never see the php code on your landing page once you browse to it. You should instead see the result of its execution.

If however, you see the PHP code on your landing page through a browser, or through the view source option that means something is wrong with your setup. The most likely cause is that your landing page does not have a php extension. So make sure to change the extension of your landing page to .php instead of .html or .htm

Seeing Javascript in your html pages is fine. Javascript is interpreted by both the browser and the server. You have the option of whether to choose a PHP or Javascript tracking code in Xtreme Conversions. If you have the knowledge, use PHP. It’s about 5% more accurate than javascript.

Additionally, there is a way to get the server to treat .html files as .php file without having to change the extension. For help regarding this point, please check with your hosting provider.

[edit] Landing page model

Here are the steps that you need to follow to enable tracking or to integrate your landing page with Xtreme Conversions.

1. Login to your Xreme Conversions control panel
2. Go to the Get Code tab.
3. Enter your campaign name ( Make one up )
4. Enter your ad name ( Again , Make it up )
5. Click Advanced , then choose single entry
6. If you'd like to use the dynamic keyword insertion feature, enter a default keyword in case no keyword is detected from the originating source of traffic.
7. Click Submit
8. Copy the code that appears and insert it at the very beginning of your landing page before the starting <html> tag.
9. Change the extension of your file from .html to .php if you are using the PHP code. You can simply rename the file or click file >> save as from your favourite html editor. You can also accomplish this by locating the file in your windows folder and renaming it. (Assuming that your windows settings let you see the file extension).
10. Identify your affiliate links and identify where the tracking id needs to be. If you need help with this step please check the forum or ask your affiliate network for help.
11. Insert the <?php echo $var; ?> snippet of code where the tracking id needs to be insert. The role of this block of code is to print out on the page the unique identifier or tracking id that will be used later to refer to the record in the database that contains the details of the traffic source.For example, if you were using an affiliate link for Clickbank, you would enter it as such: http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=<?php echo $var; ?>This is what you'll write in your html page. However, and this is an important point to understand, this code snippet is php code, and it's run or executed on the server side. So when you browse the page in your favourite browser, you will **not** see <?php echo $var; ?> - instead you will see the tracking id there. So the link above, once you browse to it, will look something like: http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=5
12. If you'd also like to use dynamic keyword insertion insert <?php echo $key; ?> wherever in your html page you'd like the keyword to display dynamically.

There is also a video that I made regarding this scenario, so be sure to check it on the videos page.

[edit] Direct Linking

When you're doing direct linking (Linking to an affiliates page), you need to understand an important concept. An affiliate URL is essentially a redirected url.

It sets a cookie with your affiliate id and then redirects the visitor to the merchant website. For example, your affiliate link for Xtreme Conversions on clickbank would be something like: http://affid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net

Go ahead and click on that link. Note that you are redirected to xconversions.com, not affid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net.Your affiliate link redirected the visitor to the merchant page. With direct linking that's exactly what we'll do. We'll do the same thing that the affiliate link does. We'll collect some information, set a cookie, generate a unique tracking id, and then redirect you to your affiliate link, which in turn will collect some information, set a cookie, and redirect to the merchant.

All this happens so quickly that the user doesn't even notice it.

In this process your own server has to collect the information, set the cookie and generate the unique tracking id.

That's why when you're direct linking - you need to create a redirect page on your hosting account. The only purpose of this page is to do what we described, collect traffic data, set a cookie, generate a unique tracking id and redirect to your affiliate link. Users will actually never see this page.

Without this page Xtreme Conversions won’t track visitor activity properly.

Xtreme Conversions will generate all the code you need for you. All you need to do is fill the short form on the “Get Code” tab and copy the code and paste the resulting text in a new html or PHP file on your server. Here are the steps to accomplish this:

1. Login to the Xtreme Conversions control panel
2. Go to the Get Code tab
3. Enter your campaign name ( Make this up )
4. Enter your ad name ( Again , Make this up )
5. Choose single entry
6. Select "Use Direct Linking".
   
7. Choose one of the three choices: PHP redirect, Meta Refresh, and Frame redirect.

Here's a short explanation of the difference between the three options:

A frame redirect will maintain your URL in the browser's URL bar.It basically keeps part of the page static and changes another part of the page to reflect the redirection.

The other two types of redirects just send you to the page you want **and** this is reflected in the URL bar - just like the affiliate link, it redirects to the merchant. The frame redirect, on the other hand, loads the merchant's page onto your own page.

The difference between a Meta refresh and a php redirect is that with a meta refresh you can choose to wait any number of seconds **before** the redirection takes place. Also, the Meta refresh is an HTML redirect, and there maybe some **very rare** compatibility errors w/ old browsers where it does not work properly.

1. Enter your complete affiliate link along with the sub id parameter of your affiliate network. The form will insert the tracking id at the end of the affiliate link you provide, so it's very important that the last parameter in your link is the tracking parameter.

What does this mean?

Affiliate and CPA networks that support tracking ids have a parameter that they expect you to fill with the tracking id. For example Clickbank, expects you to fill the 'tid' parameter with the tracking id.

So the way you would enter a click bank affiliate link is as such:

http://affid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=

Let's say you're doing one for MaxBounty, the link that would enter would be:

http://www.mb01.com/lnk.asp?o=XXXX&c=XXXXX&a=XXXXX&s1=

Make sure to include the &s1= at the end.

Let's say you're using Clickbooth, here's what a normal affiliate link would look like:

http://www.clickboothlnk.com/e/?enc=xxx&optionalinfo=&deployid=0&land=0&pid=0"

The container for the tracking id is optionalinfo, so we'd need to move that to the very end of the link as such:

http://www.clickboothlnk.com/e/?enc=xxx&deployid=0&land=0&pid=0&optinalinfo=

Appendix A gives the topic of URL parameters are more extensive explanation.

So please refer to it if you're not very clear on how all this works.

1. Click Submit
2. Copy the resultant code and insert it in a new blank web page on your server.
3. Save the page with the name you would like and make sure to give it a .php extension ( if you’re using php ) , or an .html extension if you are using javascript.
4. Point your campaigns to your newly created page.

[edit] How can you test that the tracking is working?

An important point to note is that Xreme Conversions does not track anything unless the traffic has a source or an origin. If someone directly types your URL in the browser Xtreme Conversions won't track that movement, simply because there is no data to track. The source of traffic is unknown. Getting visitors from direct typing of your url in their browser is usually uncommon , and probably won't affect your statistics much.

In order to test that XC is working, you need to visit your landing page through a link on another page, or by clicking on your ad that leads to your landing page . I have a little tool that I use when testing - HERE . All you need to do is insert the URL of your landing page and click submit, and it will produce a link to your landing page that you can use to test.

There is one other way to test that XC is working and that is to use the parameter bid_keyword={anything} at the end of your landing page URL. This will force Xtreme Conversions to track even if there is no detectable source of traffic.

Now the way you know the tracking is working is if there is a tracking id generated. So hover over the links on your landing page and check to see that there is a numerical value over the tracking parameter.

You can also view the source code of your landing page ( right click >> view source in Firefox ) and look for your affiliate links and verify that a tracking id is added to them.

Another way to verify that Xtreme Conversions is working properly, especially if you're direct tracking is to see if Xtreme Conversions set up a cookie on your browser. The way to check is to use FireFox when testing, and then go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Show Cookies -> Type xconversions in the search box. A cookie with the name xconversions set for your domain name should be listed. If you look at its content, it should contain the value of the tracking id.

[edit] Advanced Usage Scenarios ( Squeeze Pages, Wordpress Blogs and Others)

[edit] Using Squeeze Pages and Wordpress Blogs with Xtreme Conversions

This chapter will cover some of the more advanced scenarios in using Xtreme Conversions to track data. Each setup is extensible and can be modified to suite your needs.

Squeeze Page This covers a model in which you have an entry page that may or may not have any affiliate link. The visitor gets past that entry page and then clicks on your affiliate link later on - and you need to track sales from that affiliate link.

Here's how Xtreme Conversions will work and track using this type of setup.

The XC tracking code will need to be placed on the entry page, where users are first directed.

XC will detect the source of traffic, create a record in the database, generate a unique tracking id specific to the visitor's traffic source and create a cookie on the user's computer and save the tracking id in that cookie.

The visitor will then browse around the site. However, any page that has any affiliate links that you'd like to track would need to read the cookie to get access to the tracking id and append it to the affiliate link.

Let's go through a simple squeeze page setup to clarify this.

Say you direct all your traffic to a squeeze page that does not have any affiliate links on it.

You would insert the tracking code ( Made using the single entry option ) in your squeeze page at the very top. XC will track the traffic that comes to your squeeze page, generate a unique tracking id, and will save it in a cookie on the visitor's computer.

Then on the landing page that follows your squeeze page, you have your affiliate links. What you need to do here is access the cookie to get the tracking id and append it to your affiliate links. To do so, you choose the exit code option from the Get Code tab, and use the <?php echo $var; ?> snippet of code to append the tracking id to your affiliate links.

Let's go through this step by step:

1. Login to your Xtreme Conversions control panel.
2. Go to the Get Code tab
3. Enter your campaign name ( Make this up )
4. Enter your ad name ( Again , make this up )
5. Choose single entry from the advanced options
6. If you'd like to use the dynamic keyword insertion feature, enter a default keyword in case no keyword is detected from the originating source of traffic.
7. Click Submit
   
8. Copy the resultant code and insert it at the very beginning of your squeeze page before the starting <html> tag.
9. Be sure to change the extension of your file from .html to .php if you are using php code. You can simply rename the file or do a save as from your favorite html editor. You can also accomplish this by locating the file in your windows folder and renaming it. (Assuming that your windows settings let you see the file extension). If you chose the javascript option , then an html page will be fine.
10. Identify your affiliate links if you have any on your squeeze page. A typical setup wouldn't have any affiliate links, but Xtreme Conversions is flexible enough to allow you to have them tracked with this kind of setup. Identify where the tracking ids need to be , and place the needed code in. If you need help with this step please check the forum or ask your affiliate network for help. (Also please refer to the Appendix for a tutorial on URLs and how they work)
11. Insert the <?php echo $var; ?> snippet of code where the tracking id needs to be inserted. The role of this block of code is to print out to the page the unique identifier or tracking id that will be used later to refer to the record in the database that contains the details of the traffic source. For example, if you were using an affiliate link for Clickbank, you would enter it as such:
    http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=<?php echo $var; ?>
    This is what you'll write in your html page. However, and this is an important point to understand, this code snippet is php code, and it's run or executed on the server side. So when you browse the page in your favorite browser, you will **not** see <?php echo $var; ?> rather you will see the tracking id there. So the link above, once you browse to it, will look something like:
    http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=5
12. If you'd also like to use the dynamic keyword insertion feature insert <?php echo $key; ?> wherever in your html page you'd like the dynamically generated keyword to display.
13. Save your squeeze page.
14. Identify what other pages that are accessible after the squeeze page you'd like to contain affiliate links with tracking ids.
15. Under the Get Code tab choose Exit code in the advanced options.
16. Hit Submit
17. Copy the code and insert it at the top of each of the pages you identified above in step 14. Again, you need to insert this code in every single page that you'd like to have access to the tracking id. This code here will read the cookie and retrieve the tracking id from it and make it accessible for your pages.
18. Identify your affiliate links on those pages and identify where the tracking id needs to be. If you need help with this step please check the forum or ask the affiliate network for help. (Also # Insert the <?php echo $var; ?> snippet of code where the tracking id needs to be insert. The role of this block of code is to print out to the page the unique identifier or tracking id that will be used later to refer to the record in the database that contains the details of the traffic source.
    For example, if you were using an affiliate link for Clickbank, you would enter it as such:
    http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=<?php echo $var; ?>
    This is what you'll write in your html page. However, and this is an important point to understand, this code snippet is php code, and it's run or executed on the server side. So when you browse the page in your favorite browser, you will **not** see <?php echo $var; ?> rather you will see the tracking id there. So the link above, once you browse to it, will look something like:
    http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=5
    That's all there is to it. Go ahead and test it. Click on a link to your squeeze page, and get past the squeeze page and make sure your affiliate links in the pages past pick up the tracking id.

[edit] Passing Tracking Info To Aweber

At times it may be useful to store the tracking id generated by XC for the visitor in your Aweber list so that you can track beyond your web pages and through your autoresponder list.

This is a bit more advanced and not many people maybe interested in it, but it’s possible with XC. The way it works is that you create a custom variable in Aweber, and you include the tracking id to it. When you create a custom field, it will look like this in your Aweber form:
<input type="hidden" name="custom trackingid" value="" size="20">

You want to make sure that the field type is hidden so it doesn’t show up on your page for visitors. In the value field, you would add the code that prints out the value of the tracking id:
<?php echo $var; ?>So the field should look like this:

<input type="hidden" name="custom trackingid" value="<?php echo $var; ?>" size="20">

Please note, ‘trackingid’ is the name of the custom variable that I chose when creating a custom variable in Aweber. You can choose any name you’d like.

Later when you’d like to access the tracking id in an email you merely choose the insert field and choose your custom id name and Aweber will automatically insert it for you.

You can follow a similar method to also track which affiliate brought you leads and then resend their affiliate link to the leads in your autoresponder, but that’s out of the scope of this manual.

[edit] Tracking for Word Press Blogs, and Multiple Entry sites

The basic idea behind tracking multiple entry sites, or sites like a Word Press blog is that you want to only track where the visitor initially arrived to your site from, not the last page he visited is. So say that someone comes to visit your word press blog through an organic search for Doberman pinscher training, and the person clicks to see a few posts on your WP blog. What we’re concerned with is the first time he came to our website, how he got there?

So to accomplish this, we tell XC to track where he came from as usual, set a cookie as usual, and then if the user goes on to visit other pages, that XC should use the original tracking id that was generated the first time around only.

The way we do that is by checking if there is a cookie that contains the tracking id, if there is one, XC will revert to that tracking id contained in the cookie and will not generate any new tracking ids for that visitor.

Let’s follow the steps to set this up on a regular site where you have multiple pages where the user can come in from and then navigate between the different pages. We’ll cover WP blogs afterwards.

1. Login to XC
2. Go to the Get Code panel
3. Enter your campaign name
4. Enter your ad name
5. Choose Multiple entry
6. If you'd like to use the dynamic keyword insertion, enter a default keyword in case no keyword is detected from the originating source of traffic.
7. Click Submit
8. Identify all the pages where the user can possible enter from.
9. Copy the resultant code and insert it at the very beginning of every page that you identified in step 7, before the starting <html> tag.
10. Be sure to change the extension of your file from .html to .php. You can simply rename the file or do a save as from your favorite html editor. You can also accomplish this by locating the file in your windows folder and renaming it. (Assuming that your windows settings let you see the file extension).
11. Identify your affiliate links if you have any on the various pages identified in step 7 above.
12. Insert the <?php echo $var; ?> snippet of code where the tracking id needs to be insert. The role of this block of code is to print out to the page the unique identifier or tracking id that will be used later to refer to the record in the database that contains the details of the traffic source.
    For example, if you were using an affiliate link for Clickbank, you would enter it as such:
    http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=<?php echo $var; ?>
    This is what you'll write in your html page.
    However, and this is an important point to understand, this code snippet is php code, and it's run or executed on the server side.
    So when you browse the page in your favorite browser, you will **not** see <?php echo $var; ?> rather you will see the tracking id there. So the link above, once you browse to it, will look something like:
    http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=5
13. If you'd also like to use dynamic keyword insertion insert <?php echo $key; ?> wherever in your html page you'd like the keyword to display dynamically.
14. Save your pages and upload them to your server.
15. Identify what other pages accessible beyond the entry pages you'd like to contain affiliate links with tracking ids.
16. In the Get Code panel choose Exit code
17. Hit Submit
    
18. Copy the code and insert it at the top of each of the pages you identified above in step 14. Again, you need to insert this code in every single page that you'd like to have access to the tracking id. This code here will read the cookie and retrieve the tracking id from it and make it accessible for your pages.
19. Identify your affiliate links on those pages and identify where the tracking id needs to be. If you need help with this step please check the forum or ask the affiliate network for help. (Also please refer to the Appendix for a tutorial on URLs and how they work)
20. Insert the <?php echo $var; ?> snippet of code where the tracking id needs to be insert. The role of this block of code is to print out to the page the unique identifier or tracking id that will be used later to refer to the record in the database that contains the details of the traffic source.
    For example, if you were using an affiliate link for Clickbank, you would enter it as such:
    http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=<?php echo $var; ?>
    This is what you'll write in your html page. However, and this is an important point to understand, this code snippet is php code, and it's run or executed on the server side. So when you browse the page in your favorite browser, you will **not** see <?php echo $var; ?> rather you will see the tracking id there. So the link above, once you browse to it, will look something like:
    http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=5
    That's all there is to it. Go ahead and test it. Click on a link to any of your entry pages, and navigate between your different pages and make sure your affiliate links in the pages past pick up the tracking id.

[edit] WP Blog Setup

Setting up XC for WP blogs is different from the previous setups in that you can’t edit every page in WP to include the same XC code. However, it’s still simple, even simpler than the previous setup where we setup XC on a static site with multiple entry pages. The concept is the same, the implementation is slightly different.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Login to XC
2. Go to the Get Code panel
3. Enter your campaign name
4. Enter your ad name
5. Choose Multiple entry
6. If you'd like to use the dynamic keyword insertion, enter a default keyword in case no keyword is detected from the originating source of traffic.
7. Click Submit
   
8. Create a new file wp-xtreme.php and include in it the code generated above.
9. Save the file and upload it to your WP directory on your server.
10. On the same directory locate the file wp-blog-header.php
11. Open up and modify wp-blog-header.php as follows. Idefnity the following two lines:
    $wp_did_header = true;
require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-config.php');
12. Between those two lines insert the following line:
    require_once('wp-xtreme.php');
13. The final code block should look like this:
    $wp_did_header = true;
require_once('wp-xtreme.php');
require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-config.php');
    These steps here cover setting the tracking for XC and WP. Now there remains the part of how to pick up the tracking id in your posts with WP. This is a two step process. First there is a free PHP module that you have to install that allows you to run PHP code within your WP posts. You can get this module here: http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/
    Please get the module and install it before proceeding. Also, please do not get any other module that does the same thing. This specific module is required. No substitute will do.
14. Whenever you’d like to add/modify a post and include the tracking id in it, please go to XC -> Get Code.
15. Choose Exit code
16. Hit Submit
17. In WP start a new post.
18. Copy the XC code generated in step 16 and insert it at the top of your WP Blog post. This code here will read the cookie and retrieve the tracking id from it and make it accessible for your pages.
19. Identify your affiliate links on those pages and identify where the tracking id needs to be. If you need help with this step please check the forum or ask the affiliate network for help. (Also please refer to the Appendix for a tutorial on URLs and how they work)
20. Insert the <?php echo $var; ?> snippet of code where the tracking id needs to be insert. The role of this block of code is to print out to the page the unique identifier or tracking id that will be used later to refer to the record in the database that contains the details of the traffic source.
    For example, if you were using an affiliate link for Clickbank, you would enter it as such:
    http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=<?php echo $var; ?>
    This is what you'll write in your html page.
    However, and this is an important point to understand, this code snippet is php code, and it's run or executed on the server side. So when you browse the page in your favorite browser, you will **not** see <?php echo $var; ?> rather you will see the tracking id there. So the link above, once you browse to it, will look something like:
    http://affiliateid.xtreme3.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=5
21. That's all there is to it. Go ahead and test it. Click on a link to your blog, and navigate between your different posts and categories and make sure your affiliate links in the posts where you added the exit code and added the tracking id pick up the tracking id properly.
    That’s all folks.

[edit] Tracking Sales and Optins

[edit] Recording Sales and Optins

To record sales and/or optins if you have access to the thank you pages for either you would setup the tracking as previously explained in the previous chapters.

You would also insert a piece of code in the thank you pages that would read the XC cookie, retrieve the tracking id and record it in the database as having received a sale or an optin.

You may record a sale, or an optin or both on the same page.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Login to XC
2. Go to the Get Code panel
3. Click Record optin/sale from the submenu
4. Choose the proper optin/sale option
5. Hit Submit
   
6. Copy the code generated and insert it to the top of your thank page.
7. Save your page and upload it to your server.

Test it out by going through the whole setup as follows:

• Click on a link to your entry page
• Open up your thank you page.
  Note: You don’t have to optin or buy the product. You can merely visit the thank you page by typing it in the URL bar.
• Visit the reports section and go to the Sales tab and verify that a sale/optin was recorded.

[edit] Tracking Segmentation

This is a really exciting feature of XC that allows you to segment your tracking by campaigns and adgroups dynamically.

The creative possibilities of using this feature are limitless. But first let me explain to you what it is, give you a couple of examples to stimulate your creativity and show you how it works.

When you generate tracking code using XC you choose a campaign and an adname. These two fields allow you to segment your campaigns into smaller groups that you can split test, measure against or just simply for better organization of your traffic sources.

Now, consider this. XC allows you to change/create a new campaign name or ad name on the fly.

Now why in the world would you want to do something like that?

Let’s take a look.

Say you have one campaign running with one landing page. You want to run this campaign in Google, Yahoo, and MSN and you want each to appear as a different campaign in XC, or you want them to appear as the same campaign, but you want their traffic separated in different adnames.

You also want to do all this using only one landing page, or one direct linking page.

How would you do it?

With XC it’s simple. You’d add information to your ad URL that indicated to XC what you want the campaign name or ad name for the particular source of traffic to be. If that particular campaign or adname does not exist, XC will create it on the fly for you.

So let’s see how we can implement this.

You have a dog training ad running in Google, MSN and Yahoo. The Ad URL points to: http://www.yourdomain.com/dogtrainingreview.php?bid_keyword={keyword}

You want traffic from Google, MSN and Yahoo to have separate Campaign names.

• For your google ad URL add &campaign=googlecampaign as such:
  http://www.yourdomain.com/dogtrainingreview.php?bid_keyword={keyword}&campaign=googlecampaign
• For your MSN ad URL add &campaign=msncampaign as such
  http://www.yourdomain.com/dogtrainingreview.php?bid_keyword={keyword}&campaign=msncampaign
• For your Yahoo ad URL add &campaign=yahoocampaign as such:
  http://www.yourdomain.com/dogtrainingreview.php?campaign=yahoocampaign

You can ofcourse name your campaign any name you’d like, whether it’s googlecampaign, dogtraining1, or whatever you want. The only restriction is no spaces and it has to be less than 32 characters.

Let’s take a look at another example.

Say you’re running a campaign on printer ink products. You are direct linking to the merchant, and you have two ads that you want to split test to see which ad converts better.

Here’s how you do it dynamically.

You would setup your direct linking tracking as explained previously in this manual in the direct linking section. Then you would assign each ad a different ad name as far as XC is concerned so that XC will separate them and allow you to split test.

In your adwords, you would set up one campaign with one adgroup. In that adgroup, you would have two different ads that google split tests for you. For each one of those ads you would have slightly different URLs to indicated to XC that they are to be treated as separate ads.

So let’s say the URL for your direct linking page is: www.yourdomain.com/brother1601.php?bid_keyword={keyword}

In yoru first ad variation you would add the following parameter to the URL, &ad=ad1, in the second ad URL you would add the following parameter &ad=ad2 so the two ad URLs would look like this:

Ad1: www.yourdomain.com/brother1601.php?bid_keyword={keyword}&ad=ad1

Ad2: www.yourdomain.com/brother1601.php?bid_keyword={keyword}&ad=ad2

Again, you can use ad1, ad2 or any text you’d like, so long that it doesn’t have spaces and isn’t longer than 32 characters.

The possibilities for this feature are really limitless and it’s a very exciting feature.

[edit] Uploading Sales Data

Once you have accumiliated some sales in your affiliate network, you can download your stats in csv file format and upload them in XC.

XC imports the stats in csv file formats, which is essentially a plain text file with values separated by commas. XC isn’t concerned about the name or the extension of the file. The only thing XC is concerned about is that the file is comma separated text file. So please don’t open the file in excel and save it in excel format and then try to import it in XC.

To upload your sales stats navigate to the Management tab of XC and click upload sales/optin link in the sub menu.

The current networks where file imports are supported are listed. If you’d like us to include more formats, please open up a ticket at the helpdesk and include the network name and a sample stats file so we can add it to the list of supported formats.

Each supported network may have different stats format. Please refer to the XC UI for the format supported. Only the supported format will import and work properly. If your network’s stats are not in the supported format, please redownload the stats in the format required by XC.

Additionally, there is a common format that you may use to import stats for networks that do not have built in import support in XC. The format for the common file format is as follows:

tid, date (dd-mm-yyyy), # of sales, # of optins. The first line is assumed to be the column titles and won't be read.

Here's a sample file:

tid, date, sales, optins
1, 22-5-2007, 1, 0
22, 23-5-2007, 0, 1

Note: Currently when importing XC looks at the date, if there is already a sale for that date, and tracking id, XC does not overwrite it, rather it adds to it.

[edit] Reports and making the most of them

[edit] Reports and making the most of them

XC comes with a variety of repots to help you make the most out of your traffic and analyzing it properly.

The reports are divided up across two tabs, Stats and Sales.

The stats tab covers stats for all the traffic that comes to your campaigns.

There are three reports in the Stats submenu.

New repots: here you’ll see a listing of the campaigns that you have and how many clicks (frequency) each campaign has received. You can modify the date. If you want to refresh a particular report to get new data, please click the refresh link.

You can select a campaign and you’ll be presented with each adgroup it has and how many clicks each adgroup received. Again you can change the date here.

You can select an adgroup within the campaign to get a more detailed view of your traffic. You’ll be presented with all the traffic data. You’ll also be able to group your traffic by keyword, bid keyword, and domain. So for example, the keyword tab will show you all the different search keywords that users typed in, within the adgroup you are in, and how many searches it has received (frequency) and the same for bid keyword and domain.

Note: The grouping here for these three fields is within the adgroup that you are navigating and not across the entire campaign or your entire stats data.

[edit] Old Reports

These are legacy reports that show you all of your data at once. You can narrow it down by campaign or adgroup, or choose to see everything. There is no date feature here.

[edit] Search By Tid

This report allows you to enter the particular tracking id and see the traffic record that corresponds to it.

[edit] Sales Data tab

These reports are geared to allow you to analyze your ROI, what traffic is converting and which traffic isn’t.

There are three reports here.

[edit] Performing Keywords

This report shows you all the tracking ids that generated one or more sales. You can group the entire data set by campaign, adgroup, bikeyword, keyword, or domain. Each tracking id represents a traffic combination of: keyword, bid keyword, domain, adgroup, and campaign.

Note: the grouping here is different from that in the Traffic Stats tab. The group here is across your entire data set for tracking ids that generate conversions or sales for you.

There is a feature here that allows you to enter your commission rate in $$. It will automatically update the EPC (Earnings Per Click) column to show you how much each source of traffic is generating in terms of income for you. You can play around with that number and it will update the EPC column.

[edit] Non Performing Keywords

This report shows you all the traffic combinations: keyword, bid keyword, campaign, adgroup and domain that didn’t generate any sales. You can again group by the same groupings in the performing keywords report.

[edit] Optin Reports

These reports work in the same way as the Performing Keywords, except that they are for tracking ids that generated optins.

[edit] Get Code options in depth

[edit] Get Code options in depth

This chapter will deal with some of the options in Get Code that were overlooked before because they’re not necessary for most users.

[edit] Campaign

Here is where you insert the campaign or choose one that already exists. Please no spaces and no names greater than 32.

[edit] Adname

Here is where you insert the Ad name or choose one that already exists. Please no spaces and no names greater than 32.
These are the only two fields required in this form

[edit] Default Keyword

If you wish to make use of the dynamic keyword insertion, please insert a default keyword here in case the keyword is not available. The Dynamic keyword insertion feature allows you to print to the screen the same exact phrase that the user typed into the search engines. In the case where no search phrase is picked up, XC will use the default keyword you enter here.

[edit] Domain

Here you enter the domain from which you’re hosting the landing page. The format is www.domain.com. This is useful for better cookie handling.

A cookie is only accessible from the same domain that it was set. So let's say, you have your landing page on www.domain.com and that sets a cookie that has the tracking id. And then you want to read that cookie in a different page. You can only do so from a page that exists on www.domain.com.
However, if you enter your domain.com in the field provided, you'd be able to access that cookie from any page on any of your subdomains as well. So dogtraining.domain.com/reviewpage.php for example would be able to read the cookie.

The cookie is used to pass information between different pages. So if you have a squeeze page as your first page, and then a review page w/ your affiliate links, XC would generate the tracking id for the squeeze page, but then you'd need to pass it along to the review page.

[edit] Use Curl

The standard way XC works is by using a PHP function called include. However some hosting companies have the usage of include disabled because of security reasons. The reason XC uses include or curl is to enable you to have one central installation of XC and then track across as many domains as you want.

If your host doesn’t enable you to turn on the include functionality of PHP you can try the Curl option.

[edit] Page Type

There are three page types that XC deals with conceptually. One is an single point of entry page, one is one of many points of entry page, and one is not an entry page, but rather only a page deep in your domain that people leave from it through your affiliate links, or perform some type of action.

[edit] Single Entry

page is the standard landing page model in which you’re driving traffic to only one page.

[edit] Multi Entry

type of setup is where you have a site that has many pages indexed in the search engine for example, and you’re getting traffic through each page. Once a user arrives to your site they start navigating the other pages on your site, but here we’re only interested in the original keyword that brought him to your site. So you’d insert the multi-entry code in every page that is a possible point of entry.

exit pagecode is for pages where you’re not directly sending traffic to. The visitor only sees them after they’ve arrived to yoru site through another page that already has either the single entry tracking code, or the multi-entry tracking code.

This code generated by this option merely reads the tracking id from the cookie set by XC and makes the tracking id available to you to use in that page.

[edit] Use Direct Linking

This option generated a cloaked link for you if you’re direct linking. There are three cloaking options that are covered in detail in the direct linking section in the usage chapter. For completeness here’s the information again.

[edit] frame redirect

will maintain your URL in the browser's URL bar. The other two types of redirects just send you to the page you want and this is reflected in the URL bar, just like the affiliate link, it redirects to the merchant. The frame redirect, on the other hand, loads the merchant's page onto your own page.

The difference between a Meta refresh and a php redirect is that w/ a meta refresh you can choose to wait any number of seconds before the redirection takes place.

Also, the meta refresh is an HTML redirect, and there maybe some rare compatibility errors w/ old browsers that cause it not to work properly. Additionally with a Meta refresh you may include some type of content on your page if you’re using a delayed timed redirect.

[edit] Affiliate Link

This option is only available for the direct linking mode because it will automatically be cloaked for you using one for the three options discussed above.

It’s very important that you include the affiliate link in the correct format. You have to have the affiliate/cpa tracking parameter at the very end of the link with the = sign. So the link has to look like this:
http://www.domain.com/page.php?paramater1=par&paramater2=par2&trackingid=

The = sign is the last character in the link.

[edit] Useful Resources

[edit] Wealthy Affiliate

Wealthy Affiliate is one of the best resources that I know off for taking an absolute beginner and teaching them how to do PPC effectively.

Wealthy Affiliate is an online community, a very homey one at that, that will hand hold you and support you to stand on your two feet.

Everything related to PPC is covered, from Adwords, to selecting merchant, to developing good landing pages, to critiquing your campaigns and personal coaching from Kyle and Carson.

Check it out here: Wealthy Affiliate

My personal recommendation for making the most use of Wealthy Affiliate is to go through the 6 week plan, while at the same time, searching the forum for every single post that Travis (the same Travis Sago, the father of Bum Marketing) made, start from as far back, and let him guide you through his own journey, his methods and techniques, and his help to others in your same shoes. Travis has broken 7 figures months ago, and when he started at Wealthy Affiliate he hadn't even quit his job yet.

He shares everything, and to me that's a huge benefit of joining Wealthy Affiliate, though the rest of the materials are worth it by themselves.

Wealthy Affiliate is a $29/month membership. You can cancel anytime, and I guarantee you that if you make use of the resources they have, and read as much as you can, what you'll get in one month is much, much more than you can ever get by buying all those $47-$97 ebooks on how to make money online.

Get more information here: Check it out here: Wealthy Affiliate

[edit] Pay Per Click Formula

Pay Per Click Formula is a home study course developed by Gauher Chaudry, a personal friend and one of the pioneers of online marketing. Gauher has been doing online marketing since 97 and he's highly successful.

His home study course cover traffic brokerage, or how to make money by sending PPC traffic to CPA offers. The same thing as clickflipping.

Gauher is a very sincere individual and he really holds nothing back in his home study course. Additionally, there is a wonderful forum that provides superb support.

You can read more independent reviews of his course here: Warrior Forum Reviews

In short, it yields results and I highly recommend it.

I've negotiated a sizable discount for my customers. If you follow this link and enter coupon code xtreme, you'll get a $150 discount off the one time payment option.

Pay Per Click Formula

[edit] LPGen

LPGen is a new piece of software that got even me very excited, to the point that I sent two emails about it to my lists. I normally don't like to bombard my customers with a lot of stuff, and I rarely send more than one email about the same product unless I feel it rocks, and LPGen certainly does.

LPGen creates relevant pages for you, on the fly, without an work on your part (aside from setting up a template).

The sales page does a decent job of explaining the benefits and, let me tell you, they're real.

I've set up a demo for you to see how LPGen works. LPGen Demo

Note, I've only created the first page that you see. You can also add as many keywords as you wish. My sample page will create a link to an LPGen powered directory. The rest is all LPGen. LPGen will create the pages for you, with relevant content, with absolutely no work on your part.

Be sure to check out LPGen. It is a real gem of a product.

[edit] Speed PPC

Speed PPC is one of those tools that you can't live without if you are having campaigns with many different permutations and hundreds+ keywords.

SPPC will take your keyword lists and allow you to generate infinite (almost :) ) adgroups that contain your keywords at the press of a button.

It will also allow you to take pre and post keywords and add them to your keyword list in any combination that you'd like.

Speed PPC makes the creation of your google campaigns a real breeze. A must have tool if you have campaigns with many different adgroups.

Just like with Gauher, I negotiated a deep discount for SPPC for my customers with Jay Stackwell. If you follow this link, you'll get a $100 discount on this very speedy tool. :)

[edit] Link Cloaking Software

Ok, this is a challenging section to write at the moment. Everyone wants to cloak links for various reasons. I was considering building my own link cloaker, and I may end up doing that if I have to.

At this point, the best link cloaker that I know of in the industry is GoTryThis.

But as much as I like GoTryThis, it pains me to say that it doesn't work with Xtreme Conversions or any other tracking solution for that matter, and this is really a limitation for GTT. I explained a hack that's not 100% fool proof in the GoTryThis forum and I am currently trying to see if they can release a patch for their current version to make it work with XC. They are definitely planning to have that capability built into the next version that they release.

Next come two choices.

1. 'Stealth Affiliate. Don the owner is very helpful and supportive. His tool rocks, is easy to use, and customers love it.
2. 'Power Link Generator by Mike Filsaime, which is a bit pricey, given that it doesn't even do everything that GoTryThis does. It can work with XC with a little hack. PLG is good in the sense that it tells you how many people click on your link, this functionality is unfortunately absent in Stealth Affiliate.

[edit] Hosting and VPS

I've dealt with several hosting companies over the years and there are a few that I recommend.

The cheapest, quality host that I found is 1and1. I haven't had many problems with them and their support is ok. I also mostly use them for domain registration as it's a quick easy process and they're cheap. The only problem is that they only allow you to register the domains for 1 year only. Not the best move for SEO purposes.

BlueHost is high featured and quite cheap with good support. It's a step up from 1and1 in terms of being able to add on domains, having more installable scripts etc...Also their support seems better.

For VPS and dedicated servers, I would recommend MicFoand LiquidWeb.

LiquidWeb has the highest level of support that I've seen. They're more pricey than others, but you get what you paid for. If your applications are mission critical, don't go with anyone but LiquidWeb.

Now, when should you consider moving to a VPS? A VPS gives you more access to your server and allows you more flexibility in terms of what to install and run on it.

It's a common misconception that a VPS gives you more power. That's not necessarily the case. In a quality hosted environment such as LiquidWeb, they can probably handle more load on their shared hosting account than on a VPS account. However, if your applications have a lot of load, they'll ask you to upgrade to a dedicated server.

I currently have a VPS account with 1and1, but will be moving to MicFo. The VPS support at 1and1 isn't good enough for me. They're cheaper, but they expect you to handle your own server on your own.

[edit] Troubleshooting and FAQ

1. I tried the automated install but get errors:
   If you get errors using the automated install, it's almost always a problem of entering one of the fields incorrectly. Double check all passwords, root folders etc...
2. I installed correctly, and created a campaign, but I don't see anything in the reports:
   Xtreme Conversions must receive any click from an external source in order for it to be activated. You will not see anything in the reports until you click on your own link.
   Also make sure that the file extension is changed to .php
3. I integrated the code in the page, but when I view source, I can't see the code:
   The code is in PHP, you will not see the code in the browser because it will be executed on the server side.
4. I clicked my own link, but still nothing is registering
   Here are a few things to try:
   
   • Try using a different browser or computer to click on your own link. Sometimes if you are using a security or privacy software, it will not work.
   • Make sure the following flags are set to on
     allow_url_fopen if using PHP4
     allow_url_include if using PHP5
     You can check if they're on or not by putting the following code in a test.php file:
     Code:
     
     <?php echo phpinfo(); ?>
     
     Point your browser to the file and you should be able to see all your PHP settings. Scroll half way down and you should see the values of these flags. To set their values to on, you need to enter the line that's appropriate for your version of PHP in your php.ini file.
     Code:
     allow_url_fopen = on
     allow_url_include = on
     If you don't have a php.ini file, create one in your root html folder.
     
5. I did all that and it is still not tracking
   There are a couple of things to try.
   1. use the Curl option in Get Code
   2. Make sure that your PHP is not running in SAFE Mode. (XC won't work if your php is running in safe mode)
   3. Make sure that Apache doesn't have the security module (mod_security) running.
      2 and 3 are only typically applicable if you have your own VPS or dedicated server.
6. What's the password?
   123/123 for
7. How do I change the password?
   

Go to your xtreme3 folder and identify the file login.php
Locate the user/password fields at the bottom of the file and modify them as you please.

[edit] Getting Help And Support

First of all, if you have a difficult time installing php scripts, I would advise you to not try to install the software yourself. I would highly advise you to pay for an installation. The installation service is only $25. That fee is only meant to cover our costs. It’s meant as a service to you, not as a way to make additional money off of you.

It wouldn’t make me happy to see you struggle through an installation, spend hours trying to figure out that you entered the wrong password and then get really frustrated at XC for not getting installed easily.

Do yourself a favor, save yourself the frustration, and spare XC any blame. Pay for the installation service, we’ll get you up and running very quickly.

Beyond this manual, and I recommend you read it a couple of times to get a good feel for XC, the forum has a wealth of information, a wealth of questions and answers. I highly encourage you to check out the forum, see if your question has been answered and ask any further questions there.

If you need further help, please feel free to open a support ticket at the helpdesk:
http://www.xconversions.com/support

We’re very pleased to provide you with the best service that we can.

Please use the help desk instead of PM (private messages on the forum), or emails. I have to respond to tons of queries on a daily basis, deal with employees, manage developments etc…I don’t have the mind power to do all that and to remember the issues you raised in the email before the last. A helpdesk keeps all the communication in easy to read thread so I can keep track of exactly what’s happening with every customer.

I used to have a very good memory before I got so busy. So I just have to develop systems to help me remain efficient and this is one of them, kindly respect that.

Ok, I am excited, are you?

[edit] Appendix A

Here's a little explanation of the different parts of a URL:

Whenever you see the question mark symbol ‘?’ in a URL it indicates that the URL contains values that the page you are visiting is using for one reason or another. In our case here we use the ? to indicated that we are going to pass a value to clickbank, our landing page, or the merchant you’re passing the tracking id to.

What follows the ? is the name of the variable that contains the value that we want to pass. You can think of a variable as a container of some sort that contains a value whether it is a number or an alphanumeric value.

Now clickbank tells us that “I know a variable called tid that I understand”. “If you want to pass any tracking identifiers, then put them in the tid container and I’ll be sure to look into the tid container and record those values for you to see if they resulted in sales or not.”

you can feel free to remove Clickbank and insert your favorite network, and similarly remove tid, and replace it w/ your favorite network's tracking variable

Often you'll notice that there is a whole bunch of stuff after the ?

The format is this:
?parametername=parametervalue&parametername2=parametervalue2

Your affiliate link contains a few values that are being sent to the page that you're visiting. Each value is seperated by an '&' You can add, remove, modify values by simply locating the parameter, and modify everything before the following '&'. Most of the times you do **NOT** need to do so at all....I am just explaining how it works.

Now if you don't know what the structre of the link of your affiliate network is, contact them and ask them to provide you with an example.

http://subdomain.domain.com/filename?parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2&parameter3=value3

Some networks only have one parameter, some don’t, some have half a dozen. What matters is that they’re separated by ‘&’ and that the format is parameter1=value1. Finally, there has to be a ‘?’ before the first parameter. So if your affiliate network uses ‘sub=’, you would located it in the list of parameters, and if it doesn’t exist you would add it in the following way. You would append &sub=<?php echo $var; ?> in your code. So the URL would look like this:

http://subdomain.domain.com/filename?parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2&parameter3=value3&sub=<?php echo $var; ?>
link title