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Am I Doing It Right With Voluum Tracking? (9)

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Hi guys,

I've been messing around with Voluum lately. And after spending a few hours with it, I could finally set some "dummy" campaigns up just to get familiar with the system.

However, when I tested the thing myself (i.e: direct-access the campaign link >>> click on the lander's CTA link >>> arrive at the final offer link), it seemed like the click ID just stayed the same. Here is one example:

Dummy campaign: Agoda Booking - All countries

Campaign link: http://ypiog.voluumtrk.com/aa0fd9e6-...18-24&sex=Male

Lander's CTA link: http://ypiog.voluumtrk.com/click (I added 2 different landers and split traffic 50/50)

Final link on the address bar after Voluum's redirecting: http://www.agoda.com/?cid=1510426&tag=102087&cklg=1

I tested the whole process by directly visiting the campaign link, and then clicking on the lander's CTA to finally arrive at the offer link 8 times in total. And 8 times out of 8, the final URL is exactly this: http://www.agoda.com/?cid=1510426&tag=102087&cklg=1

My question is, is that "?cid=1510426" part the click ID that was supposed to be different for each visit going through the whole process? If that's the case, then the final URL displayed on the address bar should have that part show 8 unique numbers? I also asked my friend who use his own laptop and a different ISP to go through the funnel as well and he ended up with the same final link. Did I messed up something here?

The offer I used, Agoda Booking, is from Peerfly fyi.

I'm trying to get myself acquainted with this "tracking" thing at first so I can speed up later when I finally launch some real campaigns.

Please help me troubleshoot this.

Thanks guys

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That cid isn't Voluum's click ID - it's the 'campaign ID' for Peerfly that identifies the campaign.

That link is just what you pasted into the URL box for the offer in Voluum. If you want to pass anything dynamic - e.g. your click ID - you are going to have to tell Voluum to do so.

Go in and change the link to, e.g. hxxp://www.agoda.com/?cid=1510426&tag=102087&cklg=1&subid1={campaign.id }&subid2={clickid}

That will definitely pass the click ID. Note I don't know if 'subid1' and so on are the correct parameters for Peerfly.

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Hi Zeno,

Here is the affiliate link I have for that offer inside Peerfly:



And here is how it looks after I filled in the optional parameters:



So, it looks like Peerfly uses s1, s2, s3 as the tracking parameters, right? Here is the link I put in the "offer" section of Voluum for that offer: http://trkur.com/120078/15900&s1={campaign.id}&s2={clickid}

Not sure if it's correct. I'm gonna ping my AM about this too.

The question here I think is whether Voluum shows the click id and other stuff in the final URL or it will record everything internally? I mean, will they show each visitor something like hxxp://www.awesome.com/offer?id=1234 or everyone will see the exact same thing like hxxp://www.awesome.com/offer but their click id and everything else were tracked inside the system? Is there a way to show clickid report inside Voluum?

Thanks Zeno for your help

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Yep that affiliate link you are now using looks correct!

Now you'll just need to set the postback with Peerfly accordingly to send the value of s2 back.

As for click IDs, I believe Voluum records this internally and it's not displayed in the lander URL - instead you get a mangled 'voluumdata' string (this way people can't find your click ID and spam postbacks to your system > fake conversions).

The lander CTA is always the same and unmodified. The offer URL people are redirected to afterward will definitely have whatever dynamic components you configured in it, e.g. click IDs, so will be different for every user, though they don't really see this since their browser is just resolving to the final destination reasonably quickly.

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Thanks Zeno!

After reading your response, I came back to try the URLs again and it looks like they do show the campaign ID and click ID on the "trkur.com" URL right before redirecting the visits to the final offer. Here are 2 of them:

http://trkur.com/120078/15900&s1=aa0...9aa96660c5&s2=dCNNLBKKADVAO1CFGI1KEJ8C

http://trkur.com/120078/15900&s1=aa0...9aa96660c5&s2=dK7VOP2VN4EKC1CFG24K3800

The s1 which is the campaign ID stayed the same, and the s2 varies all the time. Makes sense now

One more thing about the post back URL I placed inside Peerfly, this is the list of variables they allow with the postback URL:

And here is the instruction they have for that part:

With all that, I'm wondering if my postback URL is correct here: hxxps://ypiog.voluumtrk.com/postback?cid=%subid2%&payout=%commission%

I've emailed my AM to ask since they do have a conversion test tool but I just didn't know how to run it.

Anyway, thanks Zeno for your help. You're the boss!

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Postback URL looks correct but use http rather than https - little point to adding SSL overhead.

Not sure how to use their test tool but you could always fire it yourself, i.e. plug in an example subid2 value such as dK7VOP2VN4EKC1CFG24K3800 and a payout value and then load that URL in a browser tab. I tend to use Chrome in incognito mode. This will load a blank page and should post the conversion to Voluum.

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It works Zeno!



Now I can see why leaving the click ID in the final URL could lead to spamming the postbacks inside Voluum.

Another question about Voluum that I guess I should ask also.

There is a "cost" column with which I don't know what should I put in as I guess Voluum needs the number to calculate ROI.

When I tried to edit the campaign, on the "cost model" line, it gives me 4 options. The first being no cost tracking, the second and the third ones are something that needs manual input, and the last one is automatic. And I guess the automatic option should be the best?



However, with the last option, it requires me to track that data first when I defined the traffic source before setting up the campaign. And in this example, I'm using Facebook as the traffic source.



As you can see, I already put country, age, sex as my predefined custom variables. My question is, is there a way to automate the "cost calculation" part for each click resulted from Facebook in this situation or I will have to come up with a number first for this to calculate ROI later?

Thanks boss for your help

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If your traffic source can pass cost data (most cannot) then you could use auto. So in this case, there is no point.

If you run on a CPA/CPI basis you could use that.

In this case, you should use do not track or CPC. If you choose CPC, you'll need to just pick an average/expected CPC - it will be wrong and you can update it with time to better reflect campaign average.

However, ROI will be wrong - especially when certain ads and placements give different costs. So, IMO, it's better to not track costs and just compare ad network > Voluum stats when you want to compare cost to revenue for specific 'things' e.g. ads.

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Got it!

Thanks a lot man Time to make something happen.

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