I have no factual evidence or anything, but their advertisement, which I’ve included below, leads me to think that.  Also in support of this is my rare notice of any affiliate advertisements. Anyways, I felt I needed to make a post. Now that I’m a full time affiliate I’ll have more time to blog and give you all some good reading material.

Edit: Sorry guys, I don’t know why the picture looks like crap on the preview.  Just click the image and it’ll be fine.

At my day job, we’ve been going through layoffs for the past year because our business has been slowed. I started in April 2008 and we had about 30 staff members, we grew to 70 within a year and are now back down to the high 20′s, I forget the exact count. I’ve survived many rounds of layoffs and haven’t really been worried because I know I’m in a good position to last until the very end. However, I have decided to volunteer for the next round of layoffs at my company, should they happen. They’re expected to happen by month’s end, but we haven’t received the official word, yet.

I have decided the time is now to see if I want to be a full-time affiliate. I’m going to take this summer to see what I’m able to achieve as an affiliate now that I’ll have the entire day to work on researching, developing and optimizing campaigns instead of a couple hours every night. Although I hate change, I’m extremely excited for this to happen.

I also am interested in pursuing my MBA in Finance, so I’m going to see if I can get accepted into graduate school as well.

Wes Mahler came forward June 5, 2010 and made a huge announcement, Tracking202 Has Been Re-Acquired by Original Founders.  His post is below.

We have an important announcement to make today. I’m not entirely sure how to bring about this news so I am going to do my best and just come out with it. As many of you may know, Tracking202 was acquired by another company in our space known as Bloosky Interactive last November. However since then, many things have changed. A lot of things happened and as some of you may or may not know, I was no longer part of this company for the past few months. This has all changed now.

Today, I’m pleased to announced that the original founders of Tracking202 have undone the acquisition and Tracking202 is no longer a Bloosky Interactive company! As of earlier this week, we completed a deal with Bloosky to get Tracking202 back.  I and a few members of the original Tracking202 team will be heading up the direction of the company moving forward.

We hope to continue innovating in our industry which is in need of great change more than ever. A lot has happened recently both with Tracking202, the affiliate industry and performance marketing space as a whole. We hope to change all of that for the better. We’re bringing back the original Tracking202 culture that many of you have grown to know and fallen in love with.  We are going to do our best to make Tracking202 even better starting by redoing everything that Tracking202 is currently.

We are going to be making some fairly large changes to Tracking202, some of which we’ve already began doing. One of the first things we will be doing is discontinuing Tracking202 Pro soon because we feel there are better opportunities for our company to tackle. We will be posting more and more updates on what’s to come so please feel free to stop by our blog for further future updates.

We know we have a lot of work to do ahead of us and we look forward to making things happen for the community and the industry as a whole with these new changes. We do appreciate all of the support you guys have given us throughout the years and we look forward to working with you guys again.

Hello again,
Wes

I had been hearing rumors about this for the past month or so and wasn’t sure how I felt about the move.  My opinion was that he should re-acquire the company and continue to support it.  I felt it would be in his best interest to start a new product or service for our industry from the ground up to reestablish the support of his target market.

Once it was posted publicly, I originally came forward on WickedFire, with this post, saying that, “The 202 brand will never be what it once was.”  I wanted to come out and say that my post seemed kind of harsh and I didn’t support Wes Mahler in his decision.  I would like to publicly announce that I fully support Wes in whatever he chooses to do.  I just don’t think that the auro that surrounded the 202 Platform before he sold the company to Bloosky will be able to be achieved again.  I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m just saying he has his work cut out for him if that’s what he wants to do.

I do hope that he continues to build the 202 Platform and expand its services to be everything it has the potential to be.  The consensus is that he tarnished his and 202′s reputation once he sold it.  I never blamed Wes’ decision, ever.  I’m sure his payday was nice and for that reason alone I don’t blame him.  I personally was hoping he would turn himself into a serial entrepreneur and build a new service for this industry or another and all us affiliates could once say we were there when he first hit the big time.

But, those are just my feelings about this move.  I’m excited for Wes and the rest of the 202 team.  They’re all stand up guys and it has always been a pleasure to interact with them from support to partying.

P.S. I’ll be upgrading my 202 install once they release their new version.

Just got a letter from my shared host, HostGator and they gave me a $100 coupon for any new Google Adwords coupon.

So if anybody still advertises using Google Search or the Content network, use the coupon below.  It says you have go to http://www.google.com/ads/hostgator1 to redeem.

Coupon Code: 3SXR-FQRB-3TVS-2VLR-SQC

Expires June 30th, 2010.

As promised in Plenty of Fish Case Study: Session Depth and Plenty of Fish Case Study: Session Depth (repost) I would do a case study where I would test the conversion ratio against the POF user’s Session Depth.  After letting this campaign run for a week I was very disappointed with the results of this case study and I’m sure you will be too.

At first I wasn’t getting enough data in the campaigns with the higher session depth counts, so I was constantly raising my bids in hopes of more traffic.  Even after a full 7 days of running this campaign I didn’t have enough test data and was tired of running the campaign.

After the initial test run it seems my better images have lost their touch and aren’t getting nearly the CTR they used to.  Some of them were less than .10, but for the integrity of the case study I left them running.

The conversion ratios appear to increase as session depth increases but I wouldn’t even come close to saying that the data below is significant after the first thirty impressions.  Probably not even after the first twenty.  And I think the 7.82% increase in conversions between the first and second sets of data may be nullified after sending the same amount of traffic to the second one.  It would probably be best to do another case study for the first twenty impressions, but if you want that data, you’ll have to do the testing yourself.

The only thing I found useful in the case study is that the highest CTR came from the users that had first logged in