Archive for February, 2007

If your business is anything like mine you have data scattered everywhere. I have reports that are run from google, overture (yahoo), msn and incomings from clixgalore, clickbank, shareasale and commission junction to name a few.

Getting a clear picture of what was going out and coming in was a nightmare of excel spreadsheets and trying to line data up by eye. There are a few spreadsheets available to purchase online that will give you a lot of good data but you have to enter each days data by hand. I couldn’t think of anything more tedious, so I designed a system that would take the hassle out of managing my data and let me get on with what I’d rather be doing. Making more money.

The challenge was to create a tool that was easy to use and would give clear easily used data to track campaigns. How much they cost, whether one was running away with my profits and which ones were the clear winners.

I had adopted Matt Levenhagen’s Blast method to name my campaigns and attempt to keep things under control. Don’t worry if you aren’t using this method of campaign naming, IMC works just as well if you are using naming conventions such as widgets_bluewidgets.

What I have now is a simple to use program that sits on your local computer and holds all the data in a convenient database. It’s fast, intuitive and easy to use. Best of all it just works.

Want to run a report of all campaigns over the last week, month or year? Easy. Want to see a graph showing you which months have the best sales or cost the most? Piece of cake.

It starts with an easy to use campaign manager that let’s you keep track of what campaigns you have started, which affiliate site they’re with and they’re status. IT also allows you to set a threshold. What’s a threshold? The rule of thumb is you let a campaign run to 1x or 2x the cost of a single sale. If no sales have happened or cost exceeds that threshold you should re-evaluate the campaign or simply turn it off. Sounds simple right? Well now it is as you can run a report to show which campaigns have broken that threshold.

How do I get data into this new fangled thingamajig? Each PPC and affiliate site has reports you can run that will give you a file of data. For instance you can run an adgroup report from Google that will give you data for all time. Now importing 18 months of data into a spreadsheet would be quite tedious and boring, however how about two clicks of a program and waiting a few seconds while it is automatically imported for you? You can literally have all data entered in minutes and then spend a few minutes every day, week or month updating it.

The site has videos showing exactly how to run each report and how to get that data into IMC.

You are also able to keep track of products you are selling and where. For instance PayPal has great features to let you sell products, however it doesn’t give any tracking to the product ID’s you set when putting up the button. IMC has a quick tab to let you keep track of those products.

Worried about losing your data? Fear not, you can export your data and backup your database all from within the program.

Beta testing is well underway and the current feature set is locked down. Further modules will be developed as demand arises.

The forum is being setup and will be open for business in the next week or so. It is currently being used by the Beta testers, however it will be a place for people to discuss the application and let us of know of feature requests.

Cheers,
Shane

This is the development blog for The Internet Marketers Companion (IMC) A campaign tracking and graphing program to help Internet Marketers keep track of and profit from their online campaigns.