F5 Media account flagged for excessive sub ids (17)
Hey guys,
My account just got flagged for excessive sub ids - and it wont let me access subaffiliate reporting... or it is disabled? (Will is effect the recording of my conversions??)
I must've made a newbie mistake, but I never really understood the use of Sub Ids... for all my tracking links, I Just take what is given to me from the offer and paste it in CPVlab... and consequently they all have " s1= " at the end of this link.
Can someone help me resolve this problem? And also explain what I should do next time around?
Am I suppose to put s1, s1, s3 for different offer pages? Thanks
I had this happen to me recently as well with Cake. I usually put some type of ad identifying text at the end of the link. This should not affect your conversions. Simply change the s1 at the end of your links to s2.
Are your subids too long such that it's blocking them? There is probably a limit of e.g. 150 characters. Try exporting to excel if you can. Also note in Cake it says this "Please note that the s1 parameter should only be used to pass NON-UNIQUE SubAffiliate IDs". In other words, if you are passing unique IDs through like Prosper202 subids or clickIDs then it will be unhappy with you.
FYI for cake you have 5 subids, s1/s2/s3/s4/s5. You should make s1 something simple and easy to identify as it is most easy to look at your current stats in the subaffiliate summary tab (where only s1 is shown). However, more granular data e.g. placement should be passed via s2, s3, s4, s5. Other than the fact s1 is shown in the subaffiliate tab, all the subids are equal in that you can look at them all together, add them dynamically to pixels etc. There's no reason to lump all your data into s1.
E.g. hxxp://track.com/?a=12345&c=1234&s1=exo_US_camp1_ad2&s2=angle&s3=so mething&s4=placement
Remember in Excel you can also split text to columns by a delimiter such as an underscore so there is little point in repeating stuff like US in other subids.
What is this Cake you guys speak of?
Thanks for your detailed answer zeno, but that just kinda made me more confused... I'm not sure if my subids are too long because I never even messed with them, just left them as they were given.
E.g http://track.com/?a=125640&c=22342&s1= (This is what I put in for the offer URLs in cpvlab, I had 3 offers for 5 campaigns)
I started 3 campaigns, One of them had 6 ads at 3 sites, so 18 in total...I used the keyword="____" token part to keep track of everything, such as which website, which ad and placement.
So each of those campaigns had the same 3 tracking URLs since they had 3 offers....
So should I change the last part of the offer URL for every campaign? Would this resolve my issue & prevent it next time?
e.g. http://track.com/?a=125640&c=22342&s1= or s2= or s3= or s4= ...etc
What exactly is this for anyway? Its for the affiliate network to track when conversions happen at the offer page right? Then why does it matter what subid it has, wouldnt the same s1 record them alll anyway? Or does this just overloads the tracking process?
Winny, I think your understanding of tracking is improving, well done. To help you understand this mess:
1) Cake is essentially an affiliate network/click tracking platform. As is HasOffers. Most affiliate networks use such services rather than building their own custom tracking platform. Hence why you will see many networks look similar to each other when you log in and check stats.
2) From your traffic source you might have your advert URL like this for example:
hxxp://mydomain.com/index.php?subid1=exo_US_something&subid2=creative_ 1&subid3={keyword}
Here I pass multiple subids to my tracking system - a general one identifying the campaign, a creative level subid, and a dynamic token from the traffic source.
3) In the tracking system e.g. CPVlab, you then want to configure it to collect subid1/subid2/subid3 and pass them through to the affiliate network. It's not designed to just pick up everything available and pass them correctly by magic, so you need to do it. So, what I would do is have subid1's value passed after ?s1= in the affiliate link, then subid2's value after &s2= and subid3 after &s3=. I can't give you a screenshot as I don't use CPVlab but passing of subids is something you must must must be 100% competent with. Once configured you should be able to test it by loading a sample link (i.e. like in 2)) in your browser and watching the http headers to see they get passed through to the affiliate network link
In this way, you split your data up into multiple subids and keep subid1 simple. You can also pass unique IDs e.g. click IDs or prosper202 subid number under subid4 for instance and use that in a postback URL (pixel). The affiliate network doesn't need you to pass any subids to track conversions. YOU need them to understand what ads/campaigns/angles etc are working well. You also need the subids if you are using a postback URL rather than an image/javascript pixel that relies on cookies. Additionally, when you export all your data to Excel you can look at things based on the various subids.
Furthermore, and very very importantly, the advertiser/aff network can give you feedback on quality that will only be useful if you have subids identifying the traffic. Say they look at the traffic you are sending. It's shit. You have 1 generic subid, just exo_US_something_angle1 and you get kicked off the offer. If you had split your data into various subids, they can look at them too. What do they find? On average your traffic is crap. BUT of the 10,000 clicks you sent, they were split amongst 20 different creatives which all had different subid2. It's turns out 4 out of the 20 creatives are giving great backend quality. They tell you to kill the other ads and send only those and you stay on the offer. You also now know which creatives are doing better and can test more. You get a bump. You scale. You make money.
If using CPVlab/P202 and NOT passing these extra pieces of information you might know which creatives were converting better by grace of the tracking system, but you didn't make it possible for the advertiser who pays you to dissect your traffic, so you shot yourself in the foot. You should be as transparent as possible without giving things away. They don't need to know your traffic source/placement is or what the ad specifically looks like, but if they don't have anything to segment your traffic by they can't optimise and you will likely get kicked.
Hope that helps. I suggest you post an example link (with domain removed ofc) and pic of your CPVlab setup if you need help getting the subid passing sorted. Then master it!
change to the s2 variable....the tracking platform f5 uses is called "cake" and it doesn't like unique subids or really anything lately on the s1 variable .....I believe f5 mailed out about this....as did other networks who use cake as well
Great post by zeno. I was talking to Winny on skype too, guy is improving every day and seems to have a lion's heart!
Basically what you do (I hope this helps you to understand a bit) is pass certain values using s1/s2/s3/s4 without directly connecting them. For instance, a setup could look like this:
s1=traffic source (i.e. adult, torrent, whatever)
s2=subid (unique sub id)
s3=your campaign (like a campaign with a mature angle, teeny angle etc that helps you / advertiser identifying the traffic. Like zeno pointed out, you don't need to give away placements, just an identifier. For example you put mat3 in s3, it could be mature3 campaign. Quality can differ for campaigns so I'd use that too.)
s4=another variable, you could for instance use it to split test high bid to low bid and ask for quality difference to the network. Basically anything you want to input.
Hasoffers has no problem as they use the aff_sub= variable for sub ids. Maybe cake with it's s1,s2 etc. is a little bit more confusing in the beginning, but in the end, it's just the name of the token that you have to understand / assign for certain values.
Thanks alot everyone, really appreciate all the help. You guys are awesome!
Really made me understand what they are good for and why they are necessary for me and the networks, but as for implementing them.. I need to wait until the weekend is over since my traffic source doesn't approve ads on weekends, and don't want to mess with the ones I running now in case I screw things up n leave myself with no data to work with.
On Monday I'll upload new campaigns with these "sub ids" and learn the process of using them! 
http://track.com/?a=125640&c=22342&s1= or s2= or s3= or s4= ...etc
if you wish to pass your traffic to cpvlab it should be
http://track.com/?a=125640&c=22342&s2=
you can use S2 or S3 or S4 or S5 but make sure it is located as the last parameter as cpvlab will append the unique subid to the url
Hey I just talked to my AM while setting up a campaign, she says not to put s2= but put s2={subid}, and that my postbacks need to have my subid=#s2#
Okay, lets say I set http://track.com/?a=125640&c=22342&s2={subid} ... how do I make it so my postbacks have my subid=#s2#? ( Do I even need to do this for CPVlab? )
We never really got this figured out, got pretty confusing... so I Just left s2={subid} and didn't do that postback subid=#s2# part... Will this be alright??
Guess I'll find out tomorow and update on this thread how things turn out, just a bit worried since I'm running DOI for the first time and not sure how long it takes for a conversion to track.
Conversion tracks right away (pixel fires) when the DOI is done. Only difference to SOI is the user has to confirm his e-mail.
About tracking:
In CPV, you just put in http://track.com/?a=125640&c=22342&s2= as CPV automatically inserts subid at the end. The brackets would not work, you're or she are confusing things here if I'm not misreading your post.
{subid} is the dynamic parameter in cake. You have tons of, such as #s1# or #s2# for subid1 and subid2.
Personal I would use a postback URL rather than a pixel which looks like this for your example: http://track.com/adclick.php?subid=#s2# (given your CPV is installed on root domain and not a subfolder / subdomain). You can additionally add &revenue=#price# for cake to dynamically insert the value of the conversion you received.
To put it in a nutshell:
1) Insert offer link into CPV campaign setup like this: http://track.com/?a=125640&c=22342&s2=
2) Place postback URL in cake under Testing & Tracking -> Postback URL: http://track.com/adclick.php?subid=#s2#
Now if a pixel fires, it automatically inserts the value from s2= which in this case is your subid. CPV recognizes the subid, marks it as converting and there you go with your stats. For the postback, the parameter by CPVLab is subid= for subid and revenue= for revenue!
Thanks again Franz I just did what you said,
but tracking seemed to be working fine the way I did it before, because it tracked my trafficsource approving my ads... recorded the clicks ( no conversions yet, since run time is set to be later tonight)
Before
Offer Link in CPV campaign: http://track.com/?a=125640&c=22342&s2={subid}
Postback URL in cake under Testing & Tracking: http://track.com/adclick.php
Now
Offer Link in CPV campaign: http://track.com/?a=125640&c=22342&s2=
Postback URL in cake under Testing & Tracking: http://track.com/adclick.php?subid=#s2#
Will post an update when conversions start tracking when the campaign actually runs.
winny, here's an article I found helpful on subids
http://ipyxel.com/anatomy-of-a-subid...sion-tracking/
I think the thing that trips me up on this is that there are so many different formats for things. This stuff seems to be the thing that gets me hung up worse than anything else. I need to work on knowing the whole tracking deal front to back.
are you guys sure this wont affect conversions? my account also got flagged and i changed all links a week back, it still shows excessive subid warning. offer which was converting at 8-10% consistently suddenly stopped converting. 0 leads. yet to find the reason for this, but traffic is converting for other offers on other network. may b advertiser think its poor quality and just want to enjoy free traffic without cutting me off.
Originally Posted by tmcalvin
Basically there are two parts. One part is the tracking, second part is the affiliate network. The third part can be the source, but the source actually works similar to the affiliate network.
When you set up your tracking (let's say CPVLab), you enter your offer URL. Normally this URL looks like this:
Cake: http://track.com/?a=125640&c=22342&s2= (F5, AAO, etc.)
Hasoffers: http://track.com/aff_c?offer_id=1234...=5555&aff_sub=
CPVLab naturally inserts the sub id at the very end of the offer link. In this case, we have 2 parameters at the end:
Cake: &s2=
Hasoffers: &aff_sub=
Now those are the parameters that 'receive' the subid in the affiliate network. A user clicks on your tracking link, if LP used on the LP, gets forwarded to the offer and CPVLab appends a unique subid to those URLs that is passed to the affiliate network.
When it comes to the postback URL as described above, you actually need the network to insert automatically the converting subid. To do this, you use the postback URL in CPVLab which looks like this: http://track.com/adclick.php?subid=SUBIDTOKEN
Now this token is replaced by either #s2# in cake or {aff_sub} in hasoffers. The reason this is different is that cake and hasoffers have different tokens as you can see in their variables list for each offer. So it looks like this for the post back:
Cake: http://track.com/adclick.php?subid=#s2#
Hasoffers: http://track.com/adclick.php?subid={aff_sub}
You're basically asking the affiliate network by using those parameters to input a certain value. This value is assigned by a dynamic tag which is different depending on platform and depending on the value. For instance to call the value for the payout in cake, you would need to use {payout} to get it dynamically inserting. In that case, you'd add &revenue={payout} to your postback URL. &revenue because CPVLab parameters for payout is revenue.
Great thread, guys, some superb, really thorough explanation here.
Update!!
So from my setup posted above, tracking is working perfectly fine!! Thanks everyone
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