Home > Technical & Creative Skills > Tracking Campaigns

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Volume vs Thrive Tracking vs Personal Tracker (15)

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Hi mates,

i used for a couple of month Thrive Tracker, it's a very complete tracker with a lot of features but it doesn't track the cost of the campaigns for the major of the traffic sources. For this reason i'd like to develop my own tracker, in order to use my own postbackurl and traffic source API to get the campaign costs.
I have a few questions:

1. I know most of you are using Voluum or other commercial tracking tool. How do you manage the cost of the campaigns?
2. Have you ever developed a private tracking software? Any tips? I guess i will need a powerful server (amazon?) to manage redirects and so on.

thank you

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Hi dude,

I think you're talking about traffic sources that don't have a cost token - if that's the case, then NO tracker will be able to track the cost automatically.

But Thrive, Funnel Flux and any other good tracker will allow you to update your traffic cost for any campaign afterwards.

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You can also use the API of those traffic sources (when they have one) to update the traffic cost of your campaigns via Thrive's API (I guess, didn't check their API actually)

Writing a good tracker will take you many months.

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I have indeed developed (or rather, project-managed the development of) a private tracker, which is the one I use a lot of the time.

I wouldn't recommend getting into doing that unless either a) you are an expert developer or b) you'd really like to learn how to do it. Preferably both.

A very bare-bones tracker is not actually a particularly complex project - I developed one in an afternoon for http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...l-Track-Anyway . But when we say "bare bones", we're talking REALLY bare-bones - SQL queries as the only interface, non-realtime, no GUI whatsoever, bunch of missing features, nasty hacks to get landers tracking, and so on.

Once you start turning your tracker from "absolutely minimal" to "usable without wanting to kill someone", the complexity goes up rapidly. To get to the level of something like Prosper 202 is a few months' work for a competent developer. To get to the level of Voluum is considerably more.

Added to that, you'll start to have issues with performance, and those are not trivially solvable. If your tracker is badly coded, you can be running it on the largest Amazon instance available and it still won't handle 200k clicks a day. If your tracker's really well optimised, you can run the darn thing on a Raspberry Pi.

Overall, coding a tracker to solve your cost tracking problems is less "using a sledgehammer to crack a nut" and more "using an artillery barrage to crack a nut".

My usual recommendation for cost tracking is Excel If you want to get more fancy than that, a far simpler project than a full-fledged tracker would be a tool to pull the requisite data from your existing tracker and from your traffic source, and then merge the two.

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As Caurmen said it wouldn't be worth starting coding a tracker from scratch just to get accurate costs.

Such thing can be accomplished much easily by using an existing tracker that offers API support and building external plugins to update costs.

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Thank you caurmen for your post, they are very useful tips. I know it's a bit stupid to develop a tracker only for this purposes but i'm a lazy guy or better, i prefer to spend my time to optimize my campaigns instead of updating costs. When you manage campaigns on different traffic sources, with a ton of a/b tests i guess it could be useful to have a tool for some alerts, e.g. an email alert when ROI drops down or something like that, primarily when you invest decent amount of money (decent >= 2k+/day). Last week one of my offer (direct link) went down and i loose some bucks so i start thinking about how to develop a private tracker to manage alerts and track ROI in real time.
Unfortunately on Thrive you can't update the costs in real time. I asked to the support team and it's possible to use their API but only once a day for this purpose, because a lot of resources are necessary to do it.

I guess creating a realtime tool to update ROI and to manage alerts, using Thrive's API and Traffic Source one could be the better solution for the moment.

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As you said a tool just to give alerts would solve your problem for now.

I also think FunnelFlux is going to release their API soon and that would allow you to update costs.

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That's right, we've started working on it. Since it's self hosted there's no limitation to how much time you can update the costs per day.

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No API for cost data is going to give you good enough data, you want to be using a cost token in the URLs really - the reason is because of click attribution vs campaign attribution. A cost token in the url allows the tracker to associate exact cost with each click, whereas if you use an api to check, let's say hourly, the campaign cpc, then if your costs change during any given hour, your numbers in the tracker will be wrong and unreliable.

Source: I've built dozens of tracking tools at every part of the chain

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I have had a sneak peek at the next version of FunnelFlux.

All I can say is ... OMFG.

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Yes, but you can make a final cost adjustment at the start of the day for the previous day. Your costs for the previous day will not change and it will give you 100% accurate results.

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Yes, and also using an abacus would do it, but there may also be a drastically better way to do it

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If the traffic source doesn't have a dynamic cost token or an API to poll the cost, then there is not really any other way, as the tracker cannot guess out of thin air the cost of a visit. Unfortunately most traffic sources do not have this token, so you need to either update the costs manually in your tracker or use the API when available.

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Can you reveal a little more about the next version of FunnelFlux?

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Next month

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