The question that many affiliates keep on asking is, “What is better, Tracking202 or BevoMedia?” Both of them have an excellent team, with loyal affiliates who swear by their system. Thousands of affiliates will tell you that one of the systems is why they are doing well and that without that system in place they would never have been able to make the type of money they are currently making. Still, many affiliates switch back and forth and there are even those not using either system.
So, I decided to sit down with Ryan Bukevicz the CEO of BevoMedia and Nana Gilbert-Baffoe, the CEO of Tracking202 and see what they had to say about their products. They’ve been kind enough to answer the same questions without knowing the other’s answers, leaving the possibility one of them could reveal a little too much, or not enough to defend their product. The answers are done in the order of who replied first, no preference.
Why is your platform the best solution for affiliate marketers?
Ryan Bukevicz: The Bevo Media Affiliate Portal is much more than just a keyword tracker. The interface acts as a central homebase for all internet marketers. Within the Bevo Media Affiliate Portal, users can completely integrate their affiliate networks, allowing Bevo members to sync their affiliate network stats, view offers, and retrieve their tracking codes for each individual offer on the Bevo Media interface. Bevo members are also able to completely manage their PPC accounts, and have access to our entire App section which includes several time-saving research tools, and much more. This is all in addition to the highly scalable and simple to use Bevo Tracker.
Nana Gilbert-Baffoe: This is an interesting question, I’ve pondered this before and came to the conclusion that there isn’t one tracking platform that’s best for all affiliates. Because of that, we definitely don’t try to be a one fit solution for everyone. Sometimes Bevo Media or CPV Lab will be a better solution for an affiliates needs, and we are happy and comfortable with that. Since our launch in 2008, we have strived to provide solutions for the more advanced affiliate that wants to have greater control and visibility into everything. Our open source solution allows marketers of all sizes to take advantage of the freedom to fully customize everything in the software to suit their exact business needs. In fact, it’s not unusual to find high volume advertisers using Prosper202 to track millions of clicks a month.
What do you think that other tracking consolidating platforms are missing that you have that is essential to using your platform?
Ryan Bukevicz: When developing the Bevo Media platform, we really made it a point to program the interface the correct way. We didn’t cut corners and worked hard to ensure the best experience possible for our users from a scalability perspective. We now have an entire full time tech team on staff that works non-stop at furthering the development of Bevo Media and staying innovative in the industry. On top of this, we really made it a point to create transparency between affiliates and networks. This inspired the development of our network platform. To get a good idea of our offerings as a whole, see our Bevo Media Exchange corporate website at http://exchange.bevomedia.com
Nana Gilbert-Baffoe: As I mentioned earlier, one of our strongest offerings to marketers is our fully configurable open source software. Many marketers use it right out of the box, but there are many advanced marketers who have totally modded and tweaked our Prosper202 software in their own unique ways. Just google “Prosper202 Mod” to see what I’m talking about. I believe this is one of the reasons why we’ve had such an enormous impact in the industry and garnered continuing wide spread support by everyone. We’ve never really publicly stated our numbers, but we’ve had a little over 55,000 downloads of our software over the years, and in an average month we see 1000-2000 downloads a month. We estimate close to half our users actively use our software every month. We currently have little over 49,000 user accounts and growing. Overall, we conservatively believe we power tens of millions of dollars worth of affiliate transactions every month. This was all achieved with word of mouth referrals from our users and many of the networks they drive traffic to.
Why do you think that it’s a good idea for marketers to try different CPA Networks?
Ryan Bukevicz: It’s important for affiliates to see their relationships with networks as a partnership rather than just the person who cuts you a check. Strong networks should assist you in improving your campaigns, getting your ROI as high as possible, and outsource the monetary risk of nonpaying advertisers. In exchange, the network receives their margin. With this being said, it is also important to have a few close network relationships established in order to ensure you have multiple options in case one network does not live up to their side of this ‘partnership’. It is also valuable to have a wide variety of choices available for you to leverage the best payouts and highest converting offers for your own campaigns. As an affiliate, your time is limited and every little bit of help can be the difference maker in your campaign.
Nana Gilbert-Baffoe: Every network is different and once you start to test how the same offer performs on different networks, you will see that these offers may also end up performing better. But don’t spread this out too much, the more traffic you run with a network the more opportunities open up to you for exclusive offers, better and more frequent payouts etc, so keep that in mind when trying out multiple networks.
What is a feature that you are going to add to your platform that you’d like to announce now?
Ryan Bukevicz: Since the beginning stages of Bevo Media, we have been building up our interface for one massive automated feature. We are proud to announce that this upcoming quarter, Bevo Media is set to make this plan public and launch it with a completely new version of our Affiliate Portal interface. The new version will include several highly requested features from our memberbase, as well as increased usability. You can stay updated with this announcement on the Bevo Media Blog http://blog.bevomedia.com/
Nana Gilbert-Baffoe: In a few days our newest version of Prosper202, version 1.7 will be released. This is not a major upgrade when it comes to the look and feel, however we’ve spent an extensive amount of engineering time optimizing the performance, speed and user experience of our software. For example, the new Prosper202 1.7 is blazing fast! We put a ton of engineering time into speeding up the core architecture of our engine to provide much faster redirects and pixel fires. In a test Amazon conducted, they reported that every 100ms of latency (delay) cost them 1% in sales. That means a potential 10% loss in sales for every second of latency. Our benchmarks show a whopping 2-5x improvement in redirect speeds, and this means affiliates will benefit from more sales, conversions and accurate stats just by upgrading to the new version. This is especially important for mobile where speed is crucial.
Talking about mobile, we are focusing a lot of resources into mobile as well. Mobile ad spending this year is expected to top $1.2 billion and grow by 47% next year to top 1.8 billion. Apart from the speed we talked about earlier, we also enhanced our ability to detect more mobile handsets and tablets. We are pioneering innovative research into QR codes, and carrier detection functionality to provide marketers the ability to dominate this space. We did the same for PPC and social when we first launched.
Other new features include our universal smart pixel that fires 3rd party pixels when the Prosper202 pixel is fired. Our system is smart enough to know which traffic source the conversion came from and will dynamically select and fire just the pixel associated with that traffic source. Using this universal smart pixel, our users can now benefit from some of the optimizations that are possible at the traffic source level as well as gather data in Prosper202 for further optimizations.
Finally we’ve made slight updates to our user interface to improve work flow, expect more changes in subsequent updates. Our aim here is to save users time when setting up massive campaigns, and we have solutions in development to enable more automation. Finally we recently launched http://www.Conversion202.com this is our simple but powerful A/B and multivariate testing suite of software designed to help our users split test landing pages and boost conversions. We were able to use it to increase sign-ups on our site by 35.6%
As for what’s coming after this, we have noticed display advertising is heating up on both mobile and desktop and believe we can offer powerful open-source and self hosted solutions for that as well. Further more we see room for improvement in our social tracking offerings and continue to explore ways to enhance that too. Finally, we strongly believe good tracking should not only be in the hands of affiliates and look to expand into other markets soon.
On a totally different subject, if you could sell yourself (you personally) how would you describe yourself and your style? What makes you different and interesting?
Ryan Bukevicz: I am a 100% entrepreneur to the max. I started my first company when I was just 14, and would definitely consider myself an ideas man and extremely passionate about my work. My whole life, I was really into athletics and used internet marketing as a hobby. Athletics played a big role in my development as an entrepreneur. In college, I played football and ran track for Syracuse University.
My biggest turning point was in college when I realized that I wasn’t always the biggest, fastest or strongest guy when it came to sports, but I was succeeding at whatever I was truly passionate about and revolved my goals around it. I believe mindset is hands down the most important factor in succeeding at anything in life. I decided to go full time in the affiliate marketing, and acquired enough money and knowledge to see a clear need in the industry, and self funded a company that would normally take a large amount of funding from investors. After close to 4 years of development, Bevo Media now has thousands of users and is among one of the most heavily used platforms for affiliates to manage their campaigns.
My experience with Bevo Media has opened new doors and I am now a partner in 4 other companies, and actively engage and consult other aspiring entrepreneurs through startup process.
Nana Gilbert-Baffoe: I’ll keep this part the shortest and simply say I’m a real, no nonsense and genuine person who still believes in the goodness of mankind. This may make me seems like a fish out of water in this often cut-throat world of online marketing.
You can visit
Tracking202 at http://www.tracking202.com
BevoMedia at http://www.bevomedia.com
Here’s our celebratory poster of this event:
