When using prosper202 / tracking202, subIds can be a bit confusing.  But with a careful look at the urls that are passed around the system will make it not so hard to understand.  This is my understanding of how subids work using prosper202.

If you were to…

1.  create a campaign with your affiliate link …  Hopefully your affiliate has an affiliate link (we will call afflink) that ends with SID=.  This will allow prosper202 to stick an ID there which will allow the affiliate network to keep track of conversions for you and feed the info back to prosper202.  Here is a contrived example.

http://your_affiliate_url.com/click.track?CID=90210&AFID=007&ADID=101&SID=

2. Create an ad, and then a link in prosper202.  Here is a contrived example of an ad link (we will call adlink).

http://myp202installsys.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=12345&t202kw=

3.  Use your adlink in your ads.

Then this is what would happen for a click (or pop in PPV)…

Because you advertised your adlink myp202installsys.com is first hit (see the link in #2 above).  Here prosper knows what afflink to get because of the id in the adlink.  A counter is incremented in prosper for the click on the matching campaign.  Prosper then takes the afflink from #1 above, and plugs in a SUBID (internal to prosper) at the end, maybe like this: http://your_affiliate_url.com/click.track?CID=90210&AFID=007&ADID=101&SID=911

This number (911) will be the key that the affiliate network keeps around for us.  It is meaningless to them, they just keep it around to be nice to us.  For us it is used to track a sale with.  Now, lets assume that a sale occurs for this click/pop (#911), then when the affilate network reports your sales, a sale will be attributed to SID 911 and when you plug that back into prosper202 (via reporting or post-back pixel), you will be able to see which campaign got the sale.  Now you can optimize your campaign.

Of course if you also turn on keyword tracking in your traffic source, that can get passed with the kw= piece in the adlink above, and now prosper can also tell you what keyword generated the sale.

To find out how each affiliate network allows you to plug in a subid, please check out subids.tracking202.com .