Documentation

WP Easy Polls has been tested on WordPress 2.7 and above. You will also need to have PHP5 installed on your server to run.

Installation

Installation of WP Easy Polls is not quite as straightforward as installing a regular WordPress plugin as it has a couple of additional steps. Please read and follow the directions carefully.

  1. Unzip the downloaded file. It should create a folder with 3 subfolders: wp-easy-polls, themes, and meta-refresh.
  2. Upload the entire wp-easy-polls folder into your WordPress plugins directory (wp-content/plugins).
  3. Go into the themes subfolder and upload the contents into the directory of whatever WordPress theme you are using. So if you were using the default theme, it would go into wp-content/themes/default.
  4. Go into the meta-refresh subfolder and upload the 2 files into the root of your WordPress installation.
  5. Your installation should look similar to the image on the right.
  6. Activate the plugin in the Plugins page of your WordPress Control Panel.

You should see a new WP Easy Polls menu on the left menu with two sub-menus, Create Poll and Manage Polls.

Getting Started

It is recommended that you change the default WordPress permalink structure so you get nice looking urls. In the WordPress control panel go to Settings > Permalinks and then select Custom Structure. I personally use the setting %postname%

Before creating any polls, I also recommend that you create Privacy Policy, Disclaimer, and Terms of Use pages for your blog if you don’t already have them. By default, the built in poll themes have links to pages named Privacy, Disclaimer, and Terms. If you want to use a different link structure, then you will have to modify the poll theme.

Integrating with PPC Coach Tracker

To use WP Easy Polls with PPC Coach Tracker, make sure that in the poll editor, PPC Coach Tracker is selected as your Tracking System. This will reveal two additional settings. The first is PPC Coach Tracker Domain where you need enter the url where you have installed the Tracker script (ie. http://coach-tracker.com). The second setting is titled Use Double-Meta-Refresh (DMR). Since Tracker does not hide your referrer, the CPA network you are using will be able to see where the traffic is coming from to their offers. By using DMR, you effectively “blank” the referrer which hides your poll page as the traffic source. DMR has the drawback that it only works on users of Firefox and Internet Explorer. Users of other browsers like Chrome or Opera will be redirected to your blog’s homepage instead of the offer.

You cannot use Tracker’s built in offer rotation mechanism directly with WP Easy Polls. So to rotate multiple offers, you must create a separate Offer Rotation for each offer you want to rotate. Then in WP Easy Polls, you would input in the Rotation ID for each of these created offers into the ‘Poll Offers’ box (1 per line). When setting up your PPC Campaign, grab your a.php link from tracker as normal. For the b-value, it doesn’t matter which one you pick. Just choose a valid offer rotation that you have already setup.

Setting up PPC Coach Tracker Offer Rotations

Setting up PPC Coach Tracker Offer Rotations

Setup Offer Rotations in WP Easy Polls

Setup Offer Rotations in WP Easy Polls

Integrating with Tracking202

You can setup WP Easy Polls with Tracking202, one of two ways. Using a direct linking setup, or advanced landing page setup. Direct linking is a bit simpler, but it will only track the visitors clicking through on your poll.

Direct Linking Setup

  1. In Tracking202, setup an affiliate campaign for each offer you want to rotate.
  2. In ‘Get Links’, for each affiliate campaign, get the Destination Url. This is the url you need to input into WP Easy Polls as the offer’s tracking url.
  3. In the poll editor, make sure Tracking202 is selected as your Tracking system.
  4. When setting up your PPC campaign, the url you need to use would be http://mylandingpage.com/poll1?t202kw={keyword}.
  5. Make sure to test this by putting the url in your browser, and clicking through to your offer. You should see ‘keyword’ appear in the Tracking202 Spy View.

Advanced Landing Page Setup

  1. In Tracking202, setup an affiliate campaign for each offer you want to rotate.
  2. In ‘Landing Pages’, choose advanced landing page type, and input the url to your poll page.
  3. In ‘Get Landing Page Code’, choose advanced landing page, select the landing page and each offer you want to rotate, and press the ‘Get Landing Page Code’ button.
  4. Take the ‘Inbound Javascript Landing Page Code’ and input it into the Footer field of your poll in WP Easy Polls.
  5. In the poll editor, make sure Tracking202 is selected as your Tracking system.
  6. For each offer, create a new php file in the root of your site, and paste in the code. For example, you might create offer1.php and it would be accessible through http://mylandingpage.com/offer1.php. This is the url you need to input into WP Easy Polls as the offer’s tracking url.
  7. In ‘Get Links’, choose ‘Advanced Landing Page Setup’ and generate your tracking link. This is the link you would use in your PPC campaign.
  8. Make sure to test this by putting the tracking link in your browser and see that everything is showing up properly in the Tracking202 Spy View.

Customizing Your Themes

NOTE: If you want to edit a theme, it is strongly recommended that copy it to a new theme folder. This way, your changes won’t be overwritten if an existing theme gets updated in a future version.

If the built in WP Easy Polls themes don’t meet your needs, you can always create your own. Each theme lives in its own folder underneath the pollthemes directory. The theme will be titled as the name of the folder it lives in. WP Easy Polls looks for a file called poll.html in this folder which contains the html layout of the theme and CSS stylesheet called style.css.

If you look at each theme’s poll.html file, you will see that it contains some basic html and some tokens. These tokens will be replaced by the values you filled in for a particular poll. Here is current list of available tokens for you to use:

  • %pollInstructions% – The Poll instruction text.
  • %pollOfferType% – Usually Email or Zip
  • %pollQuestion% – The Poll question text
  • %pollOption1% – The first option text
  • %pollOption2% – The second option text
  • %pollContent% – The Poll content text.
  • %feedKeyword% – The keyword used to find the RSS feeds
  • %feedOutput% – An unordered list of rss items
  • %otherPolls% – An unordered list of polls you have created
  • %blogHome% – The main url of your blog