Want To UNDERSTAND Tracking? Read This Now. (38)

If you want to really understand how tracking works, you only need to understand three things.

These three things will let you understand any tracker - not just affiliate trackers like Voluum or Prosper, but also traffic source tracking and affiliate network tracking like Cake. They all work the same way!

This tutorial's pretty long, but stick with it!



I've split it up into three sections, plus a wrap-up at the end. There are handy self-study questions in each part that you can use to make sure you've understood it before you move on to the next.



Thing The First: Database IDs

The first thing you need to understand is how databases work. All tracking runs on its own database, which is basically the same as a massive spreadsheet - columns of data.





Whenever a visitor enters any tracking system, whether that's an affiliate network tracker, an affiliate tracker like Voluum or a traffic source tracker, they are assigned an ID.

Then, the tracker associates every other piece of information it gets about that visitor with that ID. Their mobile carrier, their browser, which lander they visited, whether they converted, whatever.

That way, you can find out all the info you want from a tracker. For example, if you want to know what the conversion rates are for a mobile carrier, the tracker searches for all IDs that used that mobile carrier, then checks how many of those IDs converted and gives you the result.

EXAMPLE: You're running a campaign in the UK and want to know how Orange is doing as a carrier. The tracker looks for "Orange" in its "carrier" column, makes a note of the IDs of every visitor who has "Orange" listed, then goes through all those IDs and counts how many are listed as having converted, and how many aren't.

These IDs are called different things on different systems.

Nearly all affiliate trackers call them either a "subid" or a "clickid".

Traffic sources call them different things. Decisive, for example, calls this id a "bidhash". If you want to send information back to a traffic source - for conversion tracking - you need to know what the name they use is.

So if you see something called a subid, a clickid, or something similar, you know that's an identifier for an individual visitor in a database.

But why do you often see those with square brackets, curly brackets, or hashes around them? Well, we'll get onto that in Thing The Third - but first, you need to know about how information is passed from web server to web server.

Question to ask yourself to make sure you've understood this bit:
When you search for the CTR of visitors who landed on a specific lander, what does the tracker do to find that?



Thing The First-And-A-Half

One other thing you need to know about databases is that they have fixed "slots" for data associated with each ID, with standard names.

Many trackers let you store any information you like in those slots, but the slots are always named the same. For example, Prosper has slots called c1, c2, c3 and so on. You can store anything you like in them, from Decisive bidhashes to POF age and state info - but the slots are always called c1, c2, c3 and so on.

Likewise, Cake gives you slots called s1, s2, s3, s4, and s5. We usually use s2 to store the subid we send from our trackers to Cake, but that's just convention - you can store anything you like in there, from names of your favourite animals to guesses on the winner of the next Superbowl. Storing subids is probably more useful, though!

Thing The Second: GET requests

If you controlled both the traffic source and the offer for your campaigns, tracking would be waaaay simpler, and you'd barely have to do any setup at all.

That's because the same system would track all your visitors from arrival to exit. The thing that makes affiliate tracking tricky is that there are at least three systems involved: traffic source, affiliate tracker, and affiliate network.

Those systems have to pass information back and forward.

• The affiliate network needs to pass information to your tracker when a visitors you've tracked converts on an offer.
• To do that, your tracker needs to have passed the affiliate network the ID you were using to track them.
• The traffic source has to pass information to your tracker about which ad the visitor who just arrived at your tracker clicked on.
• Sometimes your tracker has to pass information back to the traffic source about which visitors converted, using the traffic source's ID rather than the tracker's.

Thing The Third: Tokens

Often, you won't want to send the same information every time in your GET requests - you'll want it to vary by visitor.

For example, if you're running an offer on the Cake platform, you'll want to send the subid of EACH visitor to Cake, rather than sending the same subid every time.

That's simple enough to do - you just need a piece of text that the tracker software will recognise and replace with the right information at the right time.

These are called "tokens", and they vary across all trackers, but mostly look roughly the same.

They start and end with at least one symbol rather than a letter. That can either be { and }, [ and ], # and # or something else. Sometimes tracking systems even use multiple symbols, like CPVLab's {! and !}, or Decisive's {{{ and }}}.



See http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...-Source-TOKENS for a very complete list of tokens!

Why do they do this? To signal to the tracker software that this is a piece of text that needs to be replaced, rather than just copied.

If the tracker just replaced anything called "subid", for example, it might replace the name in some GET variables - so &subid=subid would end up being &123=123 rather than what you intended, &subid=123.

So, wherever we want the tracker to put appropriate info for each visitor, rather than just the same info for everyone, we use a "token". You can usually find a list of tokens on the documentation pages of the relevant affiliate network, tracker or traffic source - if all else fails, check IAmAttila's massive list of them here or Google!

Question to ask yourself to make sure you've understood this bit:
If you know that you need to pass a subid to your affiliate network with the name "s2", and your tracker uses the subid token {clickid}, what should you put at the end of your offer URL?

Putting It All Together

You might feel like you're still confused!

But actually, you've now got all the pieces of how tracking works.

Let's look at running a campaign with Prosper, Facebook, and a Cake-based network.

Offer URL

You start out with the Cake URL, which will look like this: http://ubernetwork.com/?a=1431&c=2114&s1= .

Given everything we know above, we know that this is passing information TO "ubernetwork.com" - your affiliate network. It's passing the information "a" (affiliate ID) and "c" (campaign ID) to the network.

We know that we need to send the ID that our tracker uses too, so that Cake can pass that back when people convert, and we know that the best GET variable name to use is "s2", so we change "s1" to "s2".

Now we enter this into the "offer URL" section in Prosper. We put it in Prosper because Prosper is the part of the tracking system that needs to send information and visitors TO the affiliate network.

We know that Prosper uses the token "[[subid]]" to represent the place where we want it to put the visitor subid. So we add that as the value in the name-value pair s2=[[subid]].

When someone actually arrives at our offer, Prosper will replace "[[subid]]" with their subid - so if their ID on our tracking system is 42, they'll end up going to http://ubernetwork.com/?a=1431&c=2114&s2=42

URL for Traffic Source

Next, we tell our traffic source where to send people when they click on our ads. Prosper creates this URL for us, but it will end up coming out like this: http://www.blahblah.com/LP/Anast/CLa...d=6976&t202kw=.

We know that Prosper takes the "keyword", which is usually used as the banner name, as "t202kw". So we add our banner name for each banner to the end of that address, completing the name-value pair t202kw=Ad1 for Ad1, for example.

That means that when people click on Ad 1 in Facebook, our tracker gets sent the information that they clicked on that ad. We don't use a token here because Facebook doesn't have any tokens!

So, we've got two of the information connections between tracking systems sorted out, as we discussed in Thing The Second. We have a URL in Facebook which passes information to our tracker, and we have a URL in our tracker which passes information to our affiliate network.

URL for Postback

All we need to do now is to let our affiliate network know where to send information when someone converts, because we want to send that information back from Cake to our tracker.

We do that using a Postback URL, which we get from Prosper, and input into Cake in the "Postback URL" section of the offer.

Cake has a handy list of tokens at the side, and we know that we want to pass "s2" back to our tracker as "subid" (because we sent "subid" to cake earlier, which stored it as "s2").

So we take the Postback URL that Prosper provides, which looks like

http://track.tracker.info/tracking202/static/gpb.php?amount=&subid=

Wow great guide also seems i am the first to see it

Thanks for posting this. Great information.

Finally, it all makes sense! great guide man!

Thank you for this. Great guide.

Great guide! Will need to read it a few times!

Awesome!

Highly appreciate your efforts here. Can you give an example to setup containing ZeroPark - Voluum - YTZ

ZeroPark as traffic source
Voluum as tracker
YTZ as landing page.

How would I set this to track what traffic sources are converting in YTZ using Voluum.

Thanks

Very nice! Thank you!

Could you possibly make 2nd "Putting it All Together" with Voluum, POF and Cake?

Thank you!!!

Great writeup, perfect for newbies.

Great thanks Caurmen. These infos are priceless for newbies like me. Very helpful and appreciate much.

Originally Posted by mark_from_michigan

Very nice! Thank you!

Could you possibly make 2nd "Putting it All Together" with Voluum, POF and Cake?

And thats how tracking works... Would like to see a Voluum guide even though im sure it already exists somewhere on this forum

I wish u had this 8 years ago! 😝

Not just for the newbs, tracking is something I've always been puzzled with but this is a great KISS walkthrough thank you legend!

Amazing info, I bet this will make life a lot easier for people starting out or non-technical people.

This is perfect, cleared up almost all my tracking questions and definetly saved alot of headache.

I did have one more question tho: if running a campaign on decisive and doing tracking with prosper, is there any way to setup the postback so it automatically logs the conversions on decisive as well? The way i see it, I can pass back the converting bidhash back to prosper after the user converts, and manually fire a conversion, but im sure there has to be some way of automating this that im just not seeing... Would definetly appreciate any help!

If all fails, i guess i can just pass all campaign id and placement data from decisive and just do all my tracking thru prosper. Although i still like having the ability to use decisives system if at all possible

EDIT: Ok, i think i found something. In prosper, under "#1 Traffic sources", you can choose the pixel type as postback, and pixel code as the decisive postback URL (in my case http://win.crwd.io/convert/c1). Now i think its all finally coming together for me! Is this correct tho? Dont want to celebrate prematurely haha

Yep, you found the third-party postback!

Disclaimer: I haven't tested it and not 100% sure it works properly. Testing will tell. As long as you are logging the bidhash data though, you can always fire the conversions manually.

There is likely a simple script out there that you can upload to do postbacks as well - i.e. paste in postback URL ending with = then fill in a box with IDs on new lines, have the server fire all of them.

Anyone have one lying around?

@zeno - IanatZen knocked one up for me a while back for testing. I'll ask him to post it.

I have always been tracking under much doubt and uncertainty about what I was doing.
Your guide totally clears up my confusion. Now it all makes sense!
Thank you.

Absolutely the best explanation of tracking I have seen !! Nice Job Caurmen

Thanks caurmen.
Has been fighting with tracking since about 5 months ago, finally have mastered 95% of it about month ago. Today I've found your fantastic and simple to follow tutorial. Great work, will help a lot of people to start!

hello, great. useful information

Thanks for putting this together. It's just what I needed!

Originally Posted by zeno

Yep, you found the third-party postback!

@mindfume - usually it's because it makes optimisation easier. On Decisive, for example, it's a LOT less faff to optimise placements if you've got the conversion data right there in Decisive.

In addition, some traffic sources attempt to use conversion data to optimise for you - but how well that works is a matter of some debate...

Originally Posted by matuloo

1. Prosper and cake are both tracking solutions, prosper is aimed at affiliates, cake is for affiliate networks. Since you have Voluum, you don't need any other tracking tool. In the example used, prosper was the tracker used by the affiliate, cake was used by the affiliate network so the offer tracking links were actually generated by cake.

2.

- offer url is to be placed in Voluum in the offers section under "new offer". These links will be provided by the affiliate network.
- url for the traffic source is actually the campaign url that voluum will create for you. Thats where you send traffic to, so you need to enter it into the traffic source, when creating a new campaign.
- postback url is a way of "letting your tracker know" what click converted. Each click sent through a tracker, will get assigned a unique ID, so when a conversion happens the affiliate network will use the postback url to let the tracker know. So this postback url needs to be setup at your affiliate network. The syntax is different from one affiliate network to the next, based on what backend solution they use (cake & hasoffers are the most popular).

Hope its more clear now

Matej.

Originally Posted by raluca

Thank you so much Matej! All clear now really thank you again

Originally Posted by matuloo

1. Prosper and cake are both tracking solutions, prosper is aimed at affiliates, cake is for affiliate networks. Since you have Voluum, you don't need any other tracking tool. In the example used, prosper was the tracker used by the affiliate, cake was used by the affiliate network so the offer tracking links were actually generated by cake.

2.

- offer url is to be placed in Voluum in the offers section under "new offer". These links will be provided by the affiliate network.
- url for the traffic source is actually the campaign url that voluum will create for you. Thats where you send traffic to, so you need to enter it into the traffic source, when creating a new campaign.
- postback url is a way of "letting your tracker know" what click converted. Each click sent through a tracker, will get assigned a unique ID, so when a conversion happens the affiliate network will use the postback url to let the tracker know. So this postback url needs to be setup at your affiliate network. The syntax is different from one affiliate network to the next, based on what backend solution they use (cake & hasoffers are the most popular).

Hope its more clear now

Matej.

It really clears out some of my confusions and thanks for this amazing tutorial

Thanks for nice guide. I have a question:
In think the First, you write:"Whenever a visitor enters any tracking system, whether that's an affiliate network tracker, an affiliate tracker like Voluum or a traffic source tracker, they are assigned an ID."
As my understanding, SubID will not be same with each visitors
But in think the Third:"For example, if you're running an offer on the Cake platform, you'll want to send the subid of EACH visitor to Cake, rather than sending the same subid every time."
Pls explain to me. Thanks again

Originally Posted by marcnguyen91

Thanks for nice guide. I have a question:
In think the First, you write:"Whenever a visitor enters any tracking system, whether that's an affiliate network tracker, an affiliate tracker like Voluum or a traffic source tracker, they are assigned an ID."
As my understanding, SubID will not be same with each visitors
But in think the Third:"For example, if you're running an offer on the Cake platform, you'll want to send the subid of EACH visitor to Cake, rather than sending the same subid every time."
Pls explain to me. Thanks again

It is absolutely better now. Thanks so much

Marc Nguyen

great info ,thank you