Home > Tracking Campaigns > Thrive

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Official Launch: THRIVE - Self-Hosted Mobile & Web Tracking Platform - by iPyxel (37)

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Official Launch: THRIVE Tracking Platform
The Ultimate Self-Hosted Mobile & Web Tracker for Performance Marketing




Hey everyone,

I am excited to announce that we just launched our own self-hosted tracking platform called Thrive.

Thrive is the next generation tracking platform for serious affiliates. While we have POFpro for POF traffic and AdultAdsPro for adult traffic, Thrive is meant to be your tracking platform for any and all traffic sources:


THRIVE
www.thrivetracker.com


Thrive is the 3rd tracking platform that we've created. All the lessons and experience we've gained over the last few years have culminated into making the best self-hosted tracker there is. It's time to leave behind your dusty old trackers.

Because Thrive is self-hosted, you will always own your own data that you paid for. No 3rd party will have ownership of your data, no 3rd party has the right to look at your data, and no 3rd party has the right to prevent you from accessing your data, ever.

If you have experience with our previous products or have just heard about our brand, we only build something if we know we can be the best at it. Else, I see no point. Thrive is no different, and comes with the high quality product precision that all iPyxel products bring, and the impeccable support that comes with it.

I won't bore you further with the sales pitch.



Feature Examples

Here's a brain dump of some of the features:

1) Self-hosted, scales vertically to handle millions of clicks/day

2) Unlimited installs per domain for $99/month flat, additional domains at $39/month

3) Mobile enhanced with mobile-specific data such as device, carrier, country, OS, brand, etc.

4) Custom redirection rules on any combination of rules and paths - includes IPs, IP ranges, OSs, OS versions, URL parameter based rules, device, country, ISP, etc.

5) Multi-Variable Drill-Down Reports - Find the exact combinations (geography, creative, device, etc.) that are the most profitable. Generate Drill-Down Reports that group multiple variables into a single, expandable report across multiple campaigns or your entire portfolio

6) Cost/CPC Adjustments and Updates - Adjust spend and cost data for any campaigns for any date range through the Thrive interface to get accurate profit/ROI numbers. You can also upload a CSV with all the campaigns’ costs for a specific date range to automate the process.

7) Global 3rd-Party Post-back Piggy-backing App - Use just 1 post-back URL for all your advertisers and affiliate networks, even if you use multiple 3rd party platforms. Enter in any number of other 3rd-party post-back URLs, and Thrive will automatically forward conversions to all those post-backs.

8) Batch inserts/removals - Easily insert any landing pages or offers into any number of selected campaigns at once

9) Batch swapping/matching - Offer suddenly went down? Use the swap feature to replace that offer everywhere. Or, split test Offer B wherever Offer A is running. Thrive is all about automation

10) Campaign rotations as discrete items - Manage and edit landing page/offer rotations for batches of campaigns at a time

11) Multi-path split testing to allow any combination of paths for landers/offers

12) Landing Page Lead Capture - Track leads and form submits that are captured from your landing page as a separate data point as an offer conversion. Great for landing pages that seek visitor emails but don’t require them.

13) Tracking for Upsells - Track additional revenue for a converted visitor if they complete an additional upsell. Great for advertisers who want to track leads revenue as well as revenue from upsells

14) Campaign Tags - Group campaigns by tags so that they are organized everywhere. See the overall performance of each tag, as well as pull reports based on tags. Each campaign can be under multiple tags.

15) 30 Pre-defined Traffic Sources - All the macros/tokens are pre-populated for you. Add unlimited traffic sources. Most common traffic sources take 5 seconds to add

16) Exchange rates for different currencies - For offers that get paid in different currencies, up-to-date FOREX rates are used to convert them into USD so revenue is accurate.

17) Day-parting and week-parting data - View across any number of campaigns or the entire portfolio. View specific days of the week (e.g. Fridays only).

18) Beautiful, easy-to-use, and speedy interface

19) Video tutorial walk-throughs of the entire application

20) Manged services and custom branding available

21) Ability to create offer wall type landing pages

22) Archive campaigns that you don't need. Restore them later if you need them

23) Fast and secure FTP/SFTP updates. No need to manually update files

24) Easily clean up historical records in the database if you don't want to upgrade your server

25) Sub ID Analysis - Paste in a list of sub IDs and get the raw click and meta data in a CSV file



Scalable

You can check out all the main features on the Thrive product page, but what I should add is Thrive is way more scalable than any self-hosted tracker ever and can handle millions of clicks per day with ease. The only bottleneck is server resources, not software.

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I can go on and on, but you won't truly experience the product's awesomeness until you try it yourself.

And we're just getting started. Next up, we are going to go right back to work on some hard hitting features, such as a customizable cloaking module. Get on the tracker now!



Introductory Pricing + $100 Hosting Coupon + STM Coupon


Introductory Pricing: The tracker starts at $99/month flat introductory price. We are expecting high demand, and will likely be raising prices some time in the future, but everyone who signs up at this price will be able to maintain this price, so get in on this now!

$100 Hosting Coupon & Free Installation: We have partnered with Liquid Web as our preferred hosting provider. Their hardware stands behind our software. Use this link to get $100 off any Storm VPS Server. Plus, they will install Thrive for you for free. Just request a Thrive installation when they call you to verfiy your purchase.

Use STM coupon to get 50% off your first paid month: STMHALFOFF



30 Day Trial. No Credit Card Required. Sign Up Now.

(iPyxel clients can just log into their account to download)

This is the latest and greatest tracker. Finally, something for the modern era.


P.S. Earn 15% revenue share with our referral program! http://thrivetracker.com/affiliates

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Awesome stuff man. Will check it out.

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Just checked it out, it's a very nice platform Tom!

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Looks like a game-changer. Nice and simple, self-hosted.

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Looks awesome Tom. I'm signing up!

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Nice & Clean ... I like the look

Just two questions before starting testing:

a) Is it possible to create redirection rules based on custom variables ??
b) Reporting - Is it possible to group data based on custom variables ??

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Let the war of the trackers begin

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Healthy competition I say!

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Wow, gonna try this out for sure. Looks great!

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a) This is coming in the next week or so
b) yes absolutely, and they can be included in multi-layer drill down reports so you can see all your cominations and permutations

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Looks great and very user friendly.

Couple of questions:

1) I take it the code is encrypted?
2) Is it possible to clear stats for a campaign inside the tracker, is will you need to do so from the db?
3) Can you specify IP's (and ranges) in the coming custom rules update, that should do something specific (e.g. cloaking/not count towards final stats, like with bots for instance)

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@quinnn Thank you!

1) Yes, ionCube Loader required. Pretty straightforward PHP extension to install for your hosting provider. Else it would be pirated in 2 seconds
2) Yes, there is a historical cleanup feature, for when you really don't want to upgrade your hardware to accommodate for your usage. We have hardware resource monitoring inside the app so you can track how much of your server resources you are using and have an idea of when you should increase capacity.
3) Yes, the IP based redirection rules is coming in the next week or so. The cloaking part (not counted toward clicks) is a separate module that we will release in the near future.

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Can I redirect users based on OS version (mobile)? For example, I would want users on Android 2.x to see LP A, and users on Android 4.x to see LP B?

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Looks great, but... why use this over imobitrax or cpvlab or prosper?
What are the USP's?

(currently on imobitrax)

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are you using mysql here or some no sql solutions ?
any kind of special log processing ? in memory DB as cache and pushing to HDD - or just streight to HDD ?
what about log compression - does it require often DB cleanup if daily traffic is over 1m ?

you say "The only bottleneck is server resources, not software." but the required ioncube decoding is already a bottleneck
you could solve the piracy problem by compiling your scripts into binary executables making it lot harder to crack then to null the ioncube stuff (ioncube decoder anyone :P)

anyway you have some nice functions i didnt see anywhere else

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We're doing close to 10m impressions averagely everyday now, can the DB itself handle this kinda volume and how long it would take to generate those huge reports? Especially when you're picking a time frame, say for the entire month, it basically means 300m - 400m impressions stats that we're looking at.

Is the code catered for handling all these?

Some other things would be, click loss, redirection speed, etc.

Thanks.

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This feature will be live next week as well. Right now it's OS only.

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THRIVE is literally generations ahead of those trackers that you mention. It's my opinion that the quality of those products are very very poor, which prompted us to build THRIVE. There are a MYRIAD of features that THRIVE has at its current infancy that should make those trackers obsolete.

But, without going into all the specific features, think about this as an example. Landing pages are a basic and essential component of any tracking platform. In those products, you must enter in raw URLs in each campaign, even if you are using some of the same landing pages.

This goes directly against basic engineering concepts of object oriented programming. Any comp sci kid straight out of college would look at CPVLab and ask, "Who would build this with landing pages not as discrete unique objects?" Something simple like that just exposes the poor quality of the product that it was not built by experienced developers but hacked together. When you navigate to an iMobiTrax landing page directly, you can't even see the page because it doesn't have a sub ID. You'd be surprised how many clicks you've lost over the years by sending to landing pages that don't work unless they came through a campaign link.

And what about viewing stats for a landing page across campaigns? An extremely rudimentary concept for any data analysis. And have you opened up an iMobiTrax install with 1000s of campaigns? The interface seems like it's running on wooden cogs. I could write an essay on all the very obvious flaws with the current tracking platforms, which should tell you that we have taken great care in trying to perfect every aspect of our product, and THRIVE is just beginning.

Some of the other things:
1) THRIVE has multi-variate drill down reports. I don't think any tracker has this. iMobiTrax has a baby version of this, but it's limited to 1 campaign. THRIVE you can do over any number of campaigns.
2) Batch offer/lander inserts, including swapping out offers/landers en-mass, matching offers/landers across the board to split test a new offer/lander. Automation is in our DNA
3) THRIVE has simple manual cost-updates as well as a way to batch update costs via uploading a CSV
4) Fire unlimited 3rd party post-backs through the post-back app
5) Entire cloaking module that we'll be launching soon that brings cloaking and tracking under 1 roof
6) At this point I think I'm just rattling off Thrive features...

Even if there's something that I haven't mentioned, our team is dedicated to making this the best tracker available, and if you have a great idea on how to make THRIVE even better, we'd be clamoring over here to hear it. I think that's the more important thing . People who have experienced our support will tell you. And we work fast.

At the very least, if you're on iMobiTrax, at the intro price of $99/mo, you can at least save a few bucks. You get 30 days no obligation trial, so I hope you'll give it a shot. You'll see that it's world's apart. I have no doubt.

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One feature that would be great is changing out the base URL across the board for a number of campaigns, for example, when you've scaled something to multiple countries, but hosted on the same domain.

So you have http://myurl.com/usa/index.php
http://myurl.com/france/index.php

etc.. etc..

And then, you want to switch that out over 14 campaigns to http://mynewurl.com/

A "search and replace" function would be a nice feature. I currently, when needed, I'll do this using SQL.

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I've been using Voluum for some time and love it, but I'm very interested in Thrive for private campaigns.

Can you give me some idea on what server costs would be required to support 1,000,000 pops per day at minimum latency levels?

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Just a heads up - the Pixels/Postback page doesn't load when AdBlock is enabled in a web browser. Tried disabling it as i was writing a support ticket and it works ok now. May be worth mentioning to check that somewhere when installing?

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First of all, I'd like to preface with that we are always open to be challenged and if there are better ways to do something, we always want to hear it. We don't claim to know everything there is to know. What we can promise is non-stop pursuit to produce the best product possible and constantly improve it.

1) We are using MySQL (MariaDB also works). There seems to be a lot of misconceptions of MySQL as a poor database solution, but I disagree. MySQL won't be able to handle big data scale, but for most affiliates (millions of clicks/day), it is more than adequate. The data structure is a relational structure and relatively standard across the board with the same columns for every click. We can discuss further if anyone wants as we've had experience with NoSQL as well.

2) The system does do logging for processes as a diagnostic tool. Assuming the log folder permissions don't prevent the system from working as intended, the log files are rotated when they exceed 1MB in size, then deleted after they are 7 days old. All DB calls are done to the mysqli. If they have something in there database to work with the database in memory, that's on them, the software does not control that aspect of resource management.

3) Daily traffic over 1 million clicks..this is a separate issue unless I'm understanding you wrong. The clicks processing / routing isn't a bottleneck due to software, but rather hardware. Assuming you've got a good enough system, you would never have to clean up. But, if you did not want to continue to upgrade your hardware, then yes, there is an option to clean up historically. Again, we have some basic server resource monitoring so you can have a rough idea of whether you need to upgrade. I may have misunderstood your question, so please let me know if you want further clarity.

4) I would disagree with ionCube being a bottleneck. First, regarding binaries. We are not using binary executables because most hosting companies will not allow you to install binaries period because it is simply not from a trusted source. hosting companies aren't going to risk their security by installing our binary libraries. We are not in the encryption technology business, so we are not going to write them for a small % of customers that can install this. This must be usable by all affiliates, and we don't want to add this as a complication. Something like ionCube, however, is a trusted PHP extension. That is their entire job as a company. What ionCube does is an extra translation for scripts that run on your system. It converts it to something PHP can read. Not all parts of Thrive is encrypted. Only the most critical parts. I would be very interested to know if you find the interface to slow due to ionCube. I would love to know specifically where you think ionCube is going to be a bottleneck, and what do you mean exactly by bottleneck? Again, perhaps our knowledge is limited, so I would be more than happy to hear your thoughts if you have extensive experience in this regard. Please feel free to add me on Skype for a deeper discussion.

Thanks for the thoughtful questions.

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I assume you mean 10 million clicks/day right? Not impressions?

This is a tough question to answer with exact figures since it depends on so many things such as your processor, RAM, your server load, server configurations, DNS routing, etc. etc.

For a multi-layer drill-down report containing 3 variables, and reporting on 300-400 million clicks, I would guess it would take a few hours. Now, we are talking about generating a report for ALL possible permutations for something like Country, Offer, OS. That's Total # of Countries times offers times OS's. That's a massive report. The time required would vary wildly based on how good your server is. If it's a massive server, it would go a lot faster. At some point though, the amount of data is simply too large. To get it any faster would literally mean defying the laws of physics.

The good thing about Thrive is you can queue up reports. Larger reports get sent to a job queue, so it runs in the background and you can go do whatever else you need to do. You get a notification when your reports are finished, and you can go back to those reports at any time.

If you have other specific questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Please feel free to add me on Skype.

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Hmm, a little confused, are you talking about landing page URLs?

For landing pages, you add them as discrete entities, and you can use them in any number of campaigns that you want. 1 change in a landing page will apply to all campaigns running that landing page.

In addition, Thrive as 'Match' and 'Swap' features. E.g. if you want a landing page running in a bunch of campaigns, you can easily split test a landing page side by side in all those places by 'matching' it to a new landing page. You can also swap it out with a different landing page in all campaigns.

We've built in a lot of these automation features to make things super easy and fast.

I may have misunderstood your question though. If you can, please help me out and clarify?

Thanks!

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Server costs vary across providers so I can't really predict server costs. But, I would say that (trying to be conservative) 8-16GB RAM, SSD hard drive, and a fast CPU should be adequate.

Again, different server configs and providers will have a different impact. You don't truly know the load on your server until you try it. But, we've got basic resource monitoring so you should be able to tell quickly and upgrade/downgrade server resources as needed.

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That amount of RAM does not help in serving clicks, but it will help with the reporting. You will need all the RAM you can get. That's the only upside of using something like Voluum over THRIVE.

In my testing, a machine with 24 CPUs vs 4 CPUs will outperform in tracker-like conditions at a ratio of 3:2 for inbound click handling. For reporting, CPU also matters a lot. So it's the CPU count you want to be wary of, with your hosting provider.

1m clicks a day is ~11 clicks per second. Not much at all.

I run some non-competing services and have extensively benchmarked all sorts of permutations with scripts that would process at LEAST as much (per click) as Tom's tracker. And even a machine with only 2 CPUs and 1.5GB of RAM can process 90 clicks per second continuously (including NoSQL database writes which are not even tested; the limit here is the CPU count and RAM for the PHP processing). More than 250 clicks per second if one particular script is reduced in functionality/processing, and easily >1000 clicks per second for simple benchmarks (test TCP capacity). We're talking capacity of 300m+ clicks in a month for full processing with 12 routines.

Getting the clicks and updating the database is one thing, and I have no doubt that if your server has MariaDB (a drop-in for MySQL, no code modification needed), you can do a few million clicks per day without issue with THRIVE.

Most people don't know that MySQL/MariaDB can handle just about as many clicks per second as MongoDB and CouchDB. I've tested Mongo and Couch on several setups to handle upwards of 1000 inserts and extracts per second quite safely with zero issues as far as concurrency goes (meaning, there aren't any data discrepancies after huge volumes of clicks polling and updating the database). NoSQL is easier on the server I believe.

Reporting is where you're going to see a big drop-off in performance if you're using SQL. Brings me back to the horror days of Prosper. But Tom says, this is nothing like Prosper, so I may have to take a swing at THRIVE and see how I go.

TL;DR: you don't need a super hosting service to handle 10-20m clicks per day on THRIVE or another platform. But if you want to do reporting on these clicks, you need a shitload of memory and a high number CPUs. THRIVE's queued reporting seems to have accounted for this. Voluum may still be better for those with minimal setups utilising CDNs for static files (or even whole html files), but if you have a beast server already, THRIVE looks like something to try.

I'd like to see a NoSQL option out of the box, I think it would help with performance on non-enterprise-level systems (i.e. systems we run). Maybe you could elaborate some more on the choice of database? Is it because MySQL is more ubiquitous in the hosting world?

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THANK YOU very much for a detailed, non-biased explanation that's just technical enough for most of the guys to understand. This whole post is very much appreciated.

Yes, this is precisely the reason. Even with MySQL setups, we have had many specific config issues on people's different servers that have come up. Each host/server is slightly different, and we've had to deal with all of that as they come up (particular custom NGINX setups). So, to add onto that some NoSQL architecture that would no doubt require even more server-specific configurations and many more setups to install properly, just wasn't feasible. Most affiliates are not nearly as technical as yourself and would get lost instantly. Add onto that, most affiliates are not running at big data scale, hence MySQL is adequate (even at big data scale MySQL clusters can be utilized, along with other tools).

Thrive should be able to handle millions of click/day without any issue. But yes, as you mentioned, if you want to perform a multi-variable drill down report on a massive amount of clicks, that could take a long time to compute, and more RAM the faster it would be. However, in terms of click tracking and routing, THRIVE can handle 10s of millions per day given big enough server. You're spot on in that it affects more report generation, which we have hopefully made it user friendly by queuing reports.

I would also add that you should use Thrive if you actually want to own and control your data that you paid for, rather than a 3rd party having all the rights to your data, which is arguably the most valuable part of your operation.

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So, to clarify, say you have a campaign, translated into 15 languages, same page, same domain it's hosted on, and you need to do a domain swap since the domain got flagged or for another arbitrary reason.

Currently, with CPVLab, I have to go into each campaign, and modify the URL that way.

The quickest way for me to solve this is to upload everything to the new domain, matching the current existing domain structure of the first domain, then using an SQL statement to then go and do a search-replace on URL 1 to make it URL 2

For instance.

If I have these landing pages:

http://myfatlossjourney.com/us/index.php
http://myfatlossjourney.com/fr/index.php
http://myfatlossjourney.com/br/index.php
http://myfatlossjourney.com/za/index.php
http://myfatlossjourney.com/au/index.php

etc.. etc..

And I want to do a quick domain swap over.. I'd upload everything to http://myfatlossmission.com/ and then do a search and replace so that it now becomes:


http://myfatlossmission.com/us/index.php
http://myfatlossmission.com/fr/index.php
http://myfatlossmission.com/br/index.php
http://myfatlossmission.com/za/index.php
http://myfatlossmission.com/au/index.php


Make sense?

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@andy_d

Yes, understood. That looks to be a relatively specific way of doing things, but I will add this to the feature list. Look for an URL replace function in the future.

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I +1 this feature as well.

It would also be useful in an example where you have HTML pages hosted on a CDN, and you want to migrate from say Rackspace to another, or from a CDN to a server instead - so replacing the domain name while keeping file/folder structure would be ideal.

And of course if your domain get's blacklisted, which can't be fixed by CNAMEing.

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So does it mean?

google.com/1
google.com/2
google.com/3

All will be like 1 domain installation right?

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Yes, that will all be under 1 domain license.

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I have noticed that Thrive does not fire my conversions instantly, it is always behind a few conversions and takes 5 minutes to catch up and report the conversions. I look in my ad network dashboard and then i look at Thrive and its 5-10 mins until thrive picks up the additional conversions. Is this normal?

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Yes, there is a slight delay that allows Thrive to do a ton of caching and deciphering operations.

This serves a couple of reasons.

1) If redirect rules are not turned on for a campaign, we don't even process the user agents into location, device, etc. That meta data is processed afterward via a cron job. I believe all other trackers try to resolve all the meta data of a visitor before they redirect them, which slows down the redirect.

2) We have a complex caching system that keeps all tables blazing fast no matter what date range you pull and how much data you have.

As time passes and you have more and more data, you'll realize the benefits of this. Every other tracker will slow down, sometimes to a halt, sometimes making you wait at least several seconds before the data can be pulled as you have data. We built it with big scale in mind.

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Yesterday install update (Version 1.4.5a). Afte that, stoped work LP tokens {devicemodel} {devicebrand} {devicename} . Someone have this problem too ?

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Sounds like a server issue. Please submit a support request

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I know this has been annoying for some of you guys, so we've now given you the option to either use the same rotation object or create a new duplicate of the rotation object when you choose to duplicate a campaign.





This way, you can choose whether the duplicated campaigns will use their own unique rotations or if the duplicated campaigns will use the same rotation object as the original campaigns.

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