This is a guest post by Ross Gordon. Ross has been a huge help to Tracking202 team, even from the earliest of days before we were even launched. Ross heads the blog over at phpBay Pro Tips, which helps people make money on the Ebay Publisher Network using phpBay. Ross has helped share ideas on building the Prosper202 products and applications, he has helped promote and he is also responsbile for creating the text on the Tracking202 homepage, and the Tracking202 about us page. Ross is sharing some tips on the Export202 product which he uses to scale his campaigns, Export202 can be accessed online at export202.com, or it is also avaliable in the self-hosted version of any Prosper202 installation. Thanks Ross for your help, and without further ado here is Ross' guest blog post.

I use Export 202 all the time to scale my campaigns across the three major networks. I typically start a campaign on Google, and after optimizing it there, I use Export 202 to bring that same campaign to Yahoo and MSN.

While Export 202 is an amazing tool that will save you hours of time, there are still a few things you should remember to do along the way, especially when exporting to Yahoo.

First, while Export 202 does translate Google campaigns to Yahoo, it does not create new URLs for each ad. So when you transfer the Google campaign to Yahoo, it will still be tracking clicks as Google, and that will screw up your metrics and will make your reporting much less valuable.

So you will need to create a new URL as you normally would. Select the same ad that you were using in Google, only make sure to use Yahoo has the search engine. Now go to your CSV file of the new Yahoo version of the campaign and find the ad you want to change, then copy the old URL and find & replace it using the new URL. Do this for all your ads (may take a little time if you have a lot of different ads).

Next, I make sure my bids are right. I have noticed that after I export a Google campaign that sometimes the yahoo version has a two bid prices in the CSV (even if I had content network disabled). There have been times when Yahoo used the bid from the content network as the bid for the search network. So I had all $0.05 bids. It’s no big deal if you have a few ad groups. But when you have 1000 changing manually in Yahoo is not an option. So I make sure to do a find & replace to make the low bid prices be what I want.

Another thing I like to do is lower all my bids from what they were in Google. Yahoo traffic tends to be cheaper (not always) so I like to drop my bids by 5-10 cents to start on cheaper keywords and $.50- $1.00 on expensive keywords. But test for yourself and see if your niche is cheaper on Yahoo.

The last thing I do is I add the negative keywords manually to the account or campaign level since I noticed that I tend to get error messages when I upload the CSV with the negative keywords. You want to make sure you don’t forget to do this or you could lose a good amount of cash.

That’s pretty much it. After that your campaign should be ready to roll.