Update: 11/17/09

I have to officially induct StatsJunky into my Hall of Shame. Please DO NOT buy this software. I cannot recommend it any longer since I have tested it for a few months and it does not do what it claims. Many of the networks are not even tracking in this program. I have support tickets that are over 2 weeks old that have not been answered. I know of many others who are complaining as well that they fell for the birthday special and ended up with a dud.

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I just bought StatsJunky because they are currently running their birthday bash offer which lets you get the software for a one-time payment of $297 rather than the $79 per month for the professional version.  I have come across Stats Junky before in the past but I wasn’t going to pay the monthly fee for it and I was also concerned about data security.  Other solutions such as Tracking202 is server based rather than a desktop application like Stats Junky.

They claim that the login information to various accounts are not being passed to their central server but is kept encrypted on your PC.  You could take their word for it and there are ways to check what’s actually being sent from your computer.

What I like about it so far is that it works for what I need it to do.  For the longest time, I have been looking for an application that is able to pull in my stats from both the advertising side and the affiliate network side.  This will save me a lot of time not having to log in to each one of my accounts to pull the stats.  Of course, no application is perfect and Stats Junky isn’t either.  At the moment, it doesn’t pull in stats from networks using Direct Track.  So if you’re only with those networks, you’re out of luck.  The issue seems to be that Direct Track isn’t allowing third parties to access their API.

Anyway, many of the networks I’m a part of are not using Direct Track, so I can still find a lot of use for this.  One more thing that wasn’t working for me was Traffic Vance.  I could set up the login to my account but I coulnd’t pull any stats.  Hopefully this will get resolved in the near future.

The user interface is well designed.  Everything is self-explanatory and I didn’t have to read any of the documentation.  Basically I downloaded the software and was pulling in stats within minutes.  I haven’t tested out the tracking functionality yet.   Essentially the program adds a custom subid for each keyword that you have and when you pull in the stats, it will reconcile the costs and revenues.

Having all your stats in one place can save you lots of time but it can also give you an overview of your daily profit or loss.  You can also sort through the numbers based on EPC and conversion rate so that you can see in one glance which campaigns are working well and which ones aren’t.  Another nice this is that you can also view all your ads in the PPC platforms (Adwords, Yahoo, MSN) on one screen.  It works a lot faster than going into your account online since all the stats are already downloaded locally on your machine.

So if you are part of more than one PPC platform and 3-5 affiliate networks, StatsJunky is something you should definitely consider.  The sale ends on July 23rd so jump on it if you can.  By the way, it works on Windows so you’ll need to set up a virtual machine if you’re on the Mac.

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