LPLockdown : The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good

We’ll start off with the good here. The things it does for your pages are nice, if you’re not currently doing something like this with your pages, you should look into it. LPLockdown will :

1) Cloak your pages from other affiliates. Cakes has a database of affiliate IPs he’s collected, so when they hit your landing page they’re redirected somewhere else.

2) Steal their traffic if they steal yours. if someone rips your page 100% and leaves your javascript, you can redirect traffic from their page to your page/offer.

3) Uptime/downtime monitor so if your landing page goes down you get a notification.

The Bad

While there are positives to using this service to protect your page, there are cons to this.

1) It’s not self-hosted. And seeing as Nickycakes himself said it’s “by affiliates for affiliates”, do you want to give Nicky (an affiliate) potential access to all of your landing pages?

2) I have a friend who programs and said he programmed the exact same thing for himself in 2 days. Do you want to pay $50/month for something you can pay a programmer a few hundred bucks and have forever?

3) This is interesting…reverse IP lplockdown.com. You’ll find the site 11i.us. Check the WHOIS on that info. It’s Nicky’s actual info. Do you trust a product who was created by someone that can’t privacy protect their own self?

4) It looks like I designed that site the first week I learned Photoshop. The WordArt in the video gives it a nice ’95 touch.

The Ugly

Everyone is pretty aware that this is NickyCakes’ product. I’ve gotten the chance to meet him and chat at events and he’s a nice guy. Like with all arguing on the internet I think once everyone comes together we realize how lucky we are and the pansy e-fighting that happens doesn’t really mean anything anymore.

Be that as it may, Nicky’s online persona has always been ripping others in the industry to shreds. He rips on the big Gurus like Shoemoney and Chow, and also has torn apart myself (the Goober) and Ubercamp.

So the question is : if he really made this product to “contribute” to the industry, why does he have to charge for it (more so $50/month…maybe $5-10/month would be more legit)? Especially when it’s not anything advanced, it’s like making a blog post about how to track keywords with PHP. Again I’m not a programmer and haven’t seen the backend of LPLockdown, but after talking to friends it doesn’t seem all that hard to just do this on your own (or pay someone to program it for you). I’d use LPLockdown as a fresh reminder that you should be doing your best to hide and protect your pages.

Nickycakes having financial trouble perhaps? Gotta pay those taxes.

I talked to Wes and he’s giving UberAffiliate readers 10% off for the first 3 months of service, you have to sign up through this link to get the discount. Enjoy!

I’m going to start off by saying that Wes is one of the best businessmen I know, and I really do trust him. On countless occasions he’s programmed things for me, even built out full sites and systems like the Ubercamp membership system, and never asked for anything in return. If any of you have met him in real life you understand what I mean when I say he is a stand up guy. So the product is backed by a great developer, and you can be sure your information is safe, private, and you’ll get all the help you need. He really wants to build a legitimate strong business and that’s exactly what he’s doing.

Now that we got that out of the way, what makes Tracking 202 Pro different than the free Tracking 202? Well, a lot.

• Integration with the major PPC networks (Google, Yahoo, MSN). T202 Pro will automatically sync all your PPC data from your accounts and display the information for you beautifully. No more going by “estimated” click costs and manually entering data. You’ll get real data to work with now and your metrics will be exact. Easily one of the best features.
• Integration with affiliate networks. No more updating your subids in T202, T202 Pro automatically pulls affiliate network data and plugs it into the account. Along with that it’ll then automatically update the profit, percent change, and things like that.
• Keyword analysis. This is something that NO other tracking program has. You can go into your account and see what keywords converted which is great. But with T202 Pro, you can click on the root keyword (if it’s a broad match) and see exactly which long tails converted, and which didn’t. For example you can add the keyword “credit report” and bid on it, get some data, and then see what long tails converted. Make more customized ad groups for those specific keywords, and bam, a la profit.
• Mobile phone app. If you’re out and want to check and make sure your campaigns are running smoothly, you have the ability to do that with Stats 202.
• All the goodies that tracking this fickle will provide. Keyword analysis, IP blocking, split testing, etc. Optimizing your campaigns will be a lot easier and all managed in 1 place. You can change bids in T202 Pro and it’ll update right into your PPC accounts without you having to manually do it in each PPC account

*Suggestion for Wes : I’m sure you’ve thought about it, but definitely work on also programming in the API for Facebook Ads as well as Myspace Ads. A lot of affiliates use both these networks and it’d add a lot more real value to the program.

Pricing. T202 pro is very fairly priced I believe from the true value you’re going to get from it. I personally think it would be and I’ve started using it myself on certain campaigns. You pay a monthly fee based on how many clicks are sent, and then a flat $0.004 for each click that is tracked. It’s a respectable price for the level of optimization and increased profit you’re going to see. They also have to cover themselves, and running/developing all of this isn’t cheap.

All in all, I’d like to just tell Wes that he did a great job and made a kickass tracking system. I can’t wait to use it more and I strongly recommend that everyone else use it too. Don’t forget that 10% discount.

But if you could build your own tracking system, the perfect tracking system, what would it include? What would it do? I want to hear your thoughts on this. A few points that I’d include :

• First thing is connecting with the Adwords/Yahoo/whatever API so we can do lots of things.
• Grab the real cost data (I know P202 is working on this).
• Automatically detect click fraud and block the IPs.
• Edit PPC campaigns from the program and post the changes without going into Adwords.
• The usual graphs and whatnot.

Those are just a few things off the top of my head, I’m curious as to what you guys would include/deem necessary.

Anywho, so was it worth the cash is the question? Yeah I think it was. I only used the PPC tools since that’s all I cared about, so here’s a little review of the tools in my first experiences…

Local Tools – I’ll probably have the most fun with these tools. Basically you can put in locations (zip codes or whatever), and it will scrape keywords and add all surrounding zip codes/cities to your keyword and give you a list. You can generate an assload of longtail keywords this way and I’ll definitely take advantage of that…you should to.

Ad Generator - One of the tools I liked more than others. Basically put in your domain name (although I just put in a phony one because I didn’t want to put my landing page into the system…paranoia I guess) and a keyword in your niche, and it’ll generate a ton of ads. I like the tool just because it scrapes all the ads for your keyword and gives you a bunch of ideas for new adcopy. So I’ll copy a bunch of headlines and throw them up to test. Pretty neat.

Keyword Generator/Grabber – Your basic keyword tools here but always good to scrape as many as possible. The generator just scrapes based on keywords you input, and the grabber is similar to KeyCompete and things like that…you enter the domain name of another landing page or something and it grabs keywords they’re supposedly bidding on. Just words of caution: make sure to go through and clean out ANY list you build with a keyword tool before adding it to your campaigns.

PPC Campaign Builder - Shoemoney Tools saves all the list/ad data you scrape, and then in the end you can put all the pieces together and it will build files for complete campaigns that you can upload directly into Google/Yahoo/MSN.

Definitely worth the small investment to fool around with for a month, so sign up now and take advantage of it.