Optimize Your CPVLab Database!

I’d like to apologize up-front for the sheer lack of attention to this blog as of late. I’ve been lazy, but mostly busy, and in transit quite a lot this year. I’ve finally returned to my home soil to get a bunch of work done, relax, and plan my return to the Canadian Rockies for some more adventure (and other traveling of course!). In the year that has just passed I’ve spent most my time living in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and have had the pleasure to visit Bangkok, Phuket, Tokyo, Osaka, Vancouver, Montreal, Las Vegas,  The Grand Canyon, Miami, Anaheim, Hollywood, San Diego, San Francisco, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, Colorado, New York & The Bahamas and do a bunch of crazy-amazing stuff during that time (Including ASW and ASE!)

What I’m trying to get at is.. well.. I’ve been BUSY!

Enough of my personal life and onto the meaty stuff, eh?!

Recently I’ve had a lot of performance problems with my CPVLab installation. I’ve had my server upgraded, both hardware and software, but just wasn’t happy with the results. On top of that, I knew that my database was getting WAY too bloated for it’s own good, but I was afraid to cull my stats without a backup!

Unfortunately that led me to have problems logging in today and so I decided to fix the problem myself and would like to share how I did it so that others can enjoy a more reliable and speedy CPVLab! Anyone that runs a decent amount of PPV traffic (or any traffic really) will know that the data builds up relatively fast and can bloat your DB into performance-hell.

Here’s some simple steps on how to fix it!

Step 1 – Backup Your Data

  • Log in to your phpMyAdmin console (usually via cPanel on your server)
  • Find your CPVLab database (usually named _cpvlab) in the left-hand panel. Click on this.
  • Click on Operations
  • Under the panel listed as “Copy Database to:”, you’ll see a text-field. Enter an appropriate name in here. I chose, _cpvlab-bkp-dd-mm-yy
  • Hit Go

Step 2 – Clean Your Clicks Data

  • Log into your CPVLab and navigate to Settings >> Stats Management
  • From here, either select the campaign you wish to cull clicks from, or select “All Campaigns”
  • Select the date range from what you wish to cull (I do anything over 3 months old, and 1 month for campaigns with lots of data).
  • Click Save

Step 3 – Advanced Optimization

  • Within phpMyAdmin, go to your _cpvlab database once again as mentioned in Step 1.
  • In the right-hand panel, you’ll see a list of tables (affiliatesources, alerts etc..). Find the table names clicks and well.. click on it.
  • Go to Operations
  • Down the bottom left you’ll see “Table Management”
  • Click Defragment
  • Don’t click anything else. I tried to use the Optimize function and it messed with my DB.

 

This should help speed up those cluttered DB’s and hopefully improve your ROI!

 

– Andrew


If you’re looking for further Affiliate Marketing Guidance, check out StackThatMoney. Best community of experienced marketers from around the globe, exclusive meetups, follow along’s, tutorials and the knowledge of a thousand sun-gods.

-=-=-=-

Can’t Decide on Tracking Software?

I’ve recently switched over to a new tracking platform called Thrive by the guys over at iPyxel which I love. It’s still in development, but is constantly improving and making strides, and the best part about it can be self-hosted. The offer a 30-day trial and it’s $99 a month thereafter which is well worth the investment.

Those on a smaller budget can still opt to go the CPVLab route, another favorite of mine but a little more outdated. It is, however, more suitable for PPV traffic if that’s your traffic of choice.


Read More

PPV Landing Page Tips

First off I’d like to apologize for the lack of posts on the blog lately, I’ve been slacking and haven’t had much inspiration lately to write anything as I want every post I make to be as useful, relative or entertaining as possible (not so true with the post on ASW… to some extent )

Since I’ve shifted my focus for the next month to diversifying by building out 1 or 2 profitable PPV campaigns to run alongside some other profitable campaigns I have running at the moment, I’ve come up with a few things that I think will make lives easier and potentially help with landing page CTR (not verified to be true, but worth a test in whichever niche you promote).

Removing TLD from targets

First of all, an idea I came up with recently was that it would potentially look more trustworthy to present the user (as long as the offer you’re promoting allows it) with the name of the website, minus the TLD.

Now this only works if your targeting domains in the first place, so if you’re not, separate the campaign into two so you can have separate landers for different targets types (keywords and domains).

Basically, if your target has a “.” anywhere in it, it’s going to split it up. This isn’t flawless, especially if you’re targeting subdomains.

This will work for simple url targets such as:

something.com
something.org
something.net

It’ll also capitalise the first letter..here’s the code:

if(isset($_GET["keyword"]))
{
	$target = $_GET["keyword"];
	$tmpArray = explode(".", $target);
	$sitename = ucfirst($tmpArray[0]);
}

For the above examples, something.com, something.org and something.net

$sitename will be equal to “Something” for you to use on your pages:

Dear <!--?php echo $sitename ?--> Visitor,

Unique color scheme’s to match the target URL

Now, this is an easy way to develop color schemes for your landers with a tiny bit of PHP and CSS.

Using the above code, you can also assign classes to the main container which you are using for the site, be it the body tag or a centrally aligned div.

All you need to do is use this code on your container tag, for this example I’ll assume it’s a div:

<div class="<?php echo $sitename; ?>">
.... something goes here
</div>

Within your main CSS stylesheet, you can now style entire pages to use different colors quite easily.

This is something you would do with your top, high volume targets if you would like to test whether or not the color scheme helps CTR).

Lets assume you have your top five targets:

  • google.com
  • stackthatmoney.com
  • imgrind.com
  • facebook.com
  • mrgreen.am

Now lets open up our stylesheet. Using the above HTML, let assume we want to have a different color border for each of these sites, however you want the same color border for google and mrgreen, the same for imgrind and facebook, and stackthatmoney can have their own.

This the CSS code you could use to achieve this:

div.google .border,
div.mrgreen .border { color: #0C0; }
div.imgrind .border,
div.facebook .border { color: #06F; }
div.stackthatmoney .border { color: #06F; }

I’ll be running some split tests with this idea on my current campaigns, perhaps I’ll follow this up with a case study.

– Andrew



If you’re looking for further Affiliate Marketing Guidance, check out StackThatMoney. Best community of experienced marketers from around the globe, exclusive meetups, follow along’s, tutorials and the knowledge of a thousand sun-gods.

-=-=-=-

Can’t Decide on Tracking Software?

I’ve recently switched over to a new tracking platform called Thrive by the guys over at iPyxel which I love. It’s still in development, but is constantly improving and making strides, and the best part about it can be self-hosted. The offer a 30-day trial and it’s $99 a month thereafter which is well worth the investment.

Those on a smaller budget can still opt to go the CPVLab route, another favorite of mine but a little more outdated. It is, however, more suitable for PPV traffic if that’s your traffic of choice.


Read More