Voluum and upsell tracking: a small case study (4)
I made a short memo on voluum and offers with an upsell, as I often trouble shoot this problem with our partners. Upsells are often used on nutra products, e.g. diet, muscle, skin, etc.
Problem: I see many publishers that either don't use &txid at all in their pixels, or leave it blank: &txid=OPTIONAL. Upsells won't track if this value isn't populated from the advertiser/network.
Voluum has an article written on this, which I have posted below. Here's some additional explanation on how to track your upsells in Voluum and resolve potential problems. I'm using Cake as the network tracking software for this example, but all parameters from Cake (#s2$, #price#, #txid#) are interchangeable with whatever platform/network you are working with.
If your postback looks as follows, it’s not tracking in voluum because the txid (Cake: #tid#) parameter for a unique transaction id from the advertiser is missing on the postback (or iframe/img pixel for that matter):
Wrong for upsells: http://abcd.trackvoluum.com/postback...payout=#price#
Correct postback to track upsells in voluum: http://abcd.trackvoluum.com/postback...payout=#price#&txid=#tid#
With the wrong postback in place, voluum doesn’t know that an upsell has taken place because it only sees a click id and payout for both. It does, however, need a unique parameter (transaction id) to realize two conversions took place.
The click id is non-unique in this case because the advertiser will use it for both sales, the step 1 and step 2 upsell conversion.
Extended example for those interested:
Offer URL in voluum: http://trackingdomain.com/?a=111&c=1785&m=17&s1={campaign.id}&s2={clickid}
Skin Face Cream
s1: b0509d11-4f8a-4496-97f1-4d79fccc49b5 (campaign id generated by voluum)
s2: dB7GC7SHLE1FG67J0TOI5GEI (click id generated by voluum)
$40.00
TXID from advertiser: 171536 (unique)
Your postback for this with populated values: http://xxx.trackvoluum.com/postback?...40&txid=171536
Skin Anti Wrinkle (upsell)
1805 - Face Upsell
s1: b0509d11-4f8a-4496-97f1-4d79fccc49b5 (same campaign id)
s2: dB7GC7SHLE1FG67J0TOI5GEI (same click id because it’s still the same person buying)
$38.00
TXID from advertiser: 171538 (unique)
Your postback for this with populated values: http://xxx.trackvoluum.com/postback?...38&txid=171538
*** EXTRA info: In Cake, you will want to use s2 to pass along your click id (read here why), so it is always a good idea to contact your AM beforehand to find out if the advertiser supports passing s2 values on the upsell. Some advertisers do not, and instead they only pass along s1 values for the upsell, thereby nullifying your tracking on s2. This is a quick fix on the network/advertiser end, and you should definitely talk about it with your AM before running the offer.
Read more:
http://feedback.Voluum.com/knowledge...lickid-upsells
Shoot me your questions on this if you have any - happy to help out.
Awesome, very nice explanation! 
Boom! Thanks a lot dude, this is exactly what I needed, been struggling with this for a while now
Thanks for the explanation. I am kinda stuck here:
I am trying to send the #txid# from cake to
Can you tell me how I pass back the txid to the traffic source when I received it in
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