How Do You Keep Track

[Gaystoryman]

of the various sponsors you have listed on all your many sites? :cry:

The recent discussion on BoyAllery etc. had me thinking. With so many people making free sites, blogging, and all that, just how do you keep track of which sites push which sponsor?

I use an Excel worksheet, but damn its a nightmare at times, so what procedure do you use? Or do you even bother?

Does it even matter? I mean out of sight, out of mind, but even if it only makes a sale or two a month, that can add up over time, so do you bother to keep track of where you have which sponsor? :eek:

[gaydemon_jr]

I keep a spreadsheet like you, gaystoryman.

Name of site, sponsor program and login details.

I keep payments/cheques received in another spreadsheet.

Works okay, only it needs updating quite a lot. A necessary evil I suppose.

[basschick]

i have links to over 1500 sponsor sites up, so i think a spreadsheet would be a real pain in the ass. up until june 20 2005 we had over 100,000 web pages, most of which had sponsors.

i like stats remote. if you see any hits to a program, you'll know all your links aren't down ;) but at a certain point, if you have enough pages and sponsors, your time is probably better used doing something else rather than trying to find a couple pages with links to a sponsor you droped when the links aren't generating any clicks...

[Seth]

I too use Stats Remote for tracking sales & a spreadsheet to track payments.

There was talk a while back that Stats Remote would be able to track payments in the future. If true this will be an extremely useful update making it easy to cross reference sales vs payments from hundreds of sponsors at once.

As for link maintenance, with a few exceptions, all of our affiliate links are run through a database. One update will change every link on every page.

[Gaystoryman]

Obviously, the larger your empire, the more robust your system has to be to track all that needs tracking, but I am basically asking about how you track what sponsors you promote, and if you track what pages or sites you use for them.

Stats remote is nice, but it tells you more about the traffic. What if you create 100 free sites, each one promoting ten different sponsor. Do you track that info? If so, is stats remote giving you that info, or do you use something else?

I guess from the way I read Patti's answer, if no hits show up, it just isn't worth bothering about to swap out the sponsor, or am I assuming too much in that?

[basschick]

well, it's worth swapping the sponsors, but with 50,000 pages or more, tracking would be a miserable task that would slow down everything. it's easier to switch out what you can find fast and then when a hit shows up for a page you missed, you can swap that.

of course, if you don't use sponsor content, a lot of sites you promote can be done through a redirect and you can just change that.

[abostonboy]

I too use Stats Remote for tracking sales & a spreadsheet to track payments.



I do exactly that.

I also have a WordPad doc that lists every sponsor (login) as well as link codes to the various sites. One doc for CCbill Sponsors and another doc for the rest. I tried using excel, but it was overkill for what I really wanted.

My Speadsheet has the following fields

Check Date, Check Number, Sponsor, Period Ending, Amount
Or something like that. The more info you keep, the better.

[abostonboy]

if you track what pages or sites you use for them.



Open Ads (or whatever it's called now).

I know some that use a spreadsheet to track where they are on pages. Waste of time for me.

If you start tracking every page where you have 1-3 sponsor links then don't say it too loud as the US gov may claim that 2257's paperwork is not all that bad.

You can do a quick check in DW (assuming you have a local copy pof your site) by "find" command.