Guide - How to optimize your PlugRush traffic trades with Google Analytics
 

I've been reading this forum for years and have benefited several times, but have never given something back. I've setup a system to optimize my own PlugRush traffic trades using Google Analytics and thought it's a good way to give something back.

This guide is for everyone using PlugRush and trading traffic with it. Having Google Analytics installed is a necessity. If you don't already have it, I highly suggest you install it, because it's a really useful and free tool! If you don't have a PlugRush account yet, feel free to use my referral link ;)

I'll go step by step. If anything is unclear, please post a reply and I'll do my best to help.

1) Create your adzone in PlugRush and make sure traffic trading is set to 'Yes'.
http://i42.tinypic.com/oiat5u.png
2) Create your plugs and append this string to every URL:
?utm_source=plugrush&utm_medium=plug&utm_term={$do main}&utm_campaign=plugrush
http://i43.tinypic.com/wslo3b.png
3) Wait for your plugs to be approved and let it run for a few days. Then go into Google Analytics. Go to Traffic Sources - Sources - Campaigns. Here you should see a campaign named plugrush. Click it. Then there's one 'source', also named plugrush. Click it. Now click 'Secondary dimension' and choose 'Keyword' under 'Traffic Sources'. This should give you an overview that looks like this:
http://i42.tinypic.com/91l66h.png
A high value in 'pages/visit' and 'avg. time on site' is good. A high bounce rate is bad. Compare the values and identify that bad performing domain names.
4) Go to the Tradestats page on PlugRush and open the 'Referrals' subpage here. Find the bad domains in the list and block them by clicking 'Block Trade (Globally)'. The 'Return Ratio' of each site/domain could also be a factor in determining which trades to block.
http://i44.tinypic.com/zjcbpf.png

I repeat step 3 and 4 every few weeks. After a while, this should give you a traffic boost, because you're getting better quality traffic from PlugRush. That's it! I hope this guide was useful to some.

Thank you for sharing this with us.
I will give it a try.

Great advice. we might link this from our blog. Have you made a blog post about it somewhere? If not, I recommend doing so, with your ref code. This was a new and smart way to analyze and improve your plugrush trading. Great work!

Thanks!
No, I don't have a blog. Feel free to copy paste it to your blog. If you want to give credit some way, including my ref link or a link to my site (babepedia.com) would be much appreciated.

good write up. appreciate the time and effort you put into this.

Thanks for nice sharing

I use te3 for my trades , I added an feed entry with the plugrush url in it , lets see if it tracks correctly

nice work thanks

Good work OP. I've sent you a PM.

Do this work the same as with paid traffic

http://new.tinygrab.com/bfcd12307247...73c53caf70.png

where did I go wrong? :Oh crap:Oh crap
instead of domains I have only {$do main}

that should be {domain}

I do have a question 4 you.

What url did u used for ur target

An alternative is to create a feeder for http://widget.plugrush.com/ in te3 and you can see it there

Really nice. How do you know about {$domain}? Is it documented somewhere? Is there any other interesting variable for tracking?

I set this up but does not seem to work maybe i did something wrong

the set if done properly works , make sure you follow all the instructions.

that been said i am very frustrated with plugrush

Sorry for the late replies, guys. I thought I had email notifications enabled for this thread, but didn't.

As mrgqw pointed out, it should be {$domain}. Sorry about the typo.

Yes, you can use it with any traffic source where you can set the URL yourself. Google has an URL builder available to help you with the utm tags:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867

Whether or not you can use tokens like {$domain} depends on the traffic source.

PlugRush has a page in their FAQ on the available tokens. See this page:
https://www.plugrush.com/account/faq/4/36

Here are the tokens:

{$id} - a unique ID of the traffic source/website

{$cc} - two letter country code of the visitor

{$category} - the category of the traffic source/website

{$domain} - the domain of the traffic source/website

{$trafficsource} - type of the traffic source (babelog, blog, dump, mgp, tgp or tube)

{$ad_id} - a unique ID of your ad (PlugTraffic only)

{$ad_ref} - your internal ad reference (PlugTraffic only)

{$cc}, {$category} and {$domain} are the most interesting ones in my opinion. You could combine {$domain} and {$cc} to see the country stats per domain. That could be a nice idea for a 2nd thread :)

P-R

has been a PITA lately , they dont wan to approve my plugs , as they dont want them pointing to my front page.

if you are using TE2 , you can setup a feeder for widget.plugrush.com/