Home > Technical & Creative Skills > Tracking Campaigns

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What should i be tracking? (9)

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Hey Stackers

I have launched a campaign recently and basically went with my gut in regards to what to track.

Most networks from what i see have only 5 variables and 1 of them is for tracking conversions. Which leaves me with 4 and I input : Carrier, OS, Device, City and Click ID for conversions.

Common sense tells me tracking these variables can provide a lot of details of what's working and what's not.

Can someone tell me for a noobie what would be optimal for tracking ?

If it makes any difference, I use Voluum and it's for mobile campaigns.

Thanks in advance,

Aris

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Aris - you don't need to manually track any of those variables you listed, because Voluum already track all of them by default and automatically! (Moreover - you may not want to pass too much unnecessary information to your affiliate network...)

I don't know what other people use those aff network tokens to track. Personally I only track campaign id and traffic source id. I think that's enough information for the aff network / advertiser to know in order to give me feedback on traffic quality - for example if the traffic from a certain traffic source isn't backing out for them, some advertisers will tell you and give you a chance to stop traffic from that traffic source instead of booting you from the offer altogether.


Amy

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Damn.... What about clickid? Dont you have to pass that in order to get conversions to work ?

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I thought this info was for me and not the network )

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Oh wait...are you talking about TRAFFIC networks or AFFILIATE networks?

And if it's the latter, is it your offer link or postback?

Maybe it would help if you could paste your link here? Just change a part of it before posting it to keep it private.

Amy

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Im talking about the offer link provided by the affiliate network. It usually has sub ids 1-5 that tou can add and one of them is usually the clickid macro to track conversions.

Hope that helps

Aris

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Ah OK so the offer link! Yes click id is the only essential parameter to include. I usually also include the traffic source and campaign id tokens as well, so that if the advertiser should ever have a problem with my lead quality, they may be able to tell me which traffic source(s) are not backing out so I could stop sending traffic from those sources. (Probably not every advertiser would go through the trouble, but at least the option would be there.)

So a sample offer link would look like this:

http://affnetwork.com/?a=11111&b=22222&s1={trafficsource.id}&s2={clickid }&s3={campaign.id}

Note: It doesn't matter which variable is matched to which token, as long as the click id in the affiliate network postback is assigned to the same variable. So my postback for the offer above would look something like this:

htt p://abcde.trackvoluum.com/postback?cid=#s2#&payout=#price#

(And of course the variable names in both links above will be specific to the particular traffic source.)


Hope that helps!


Amy

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Got it thanks

While we are on the topic. I have a quick question in regards to the campaign links used to redirect the traffic to the offer page from a lander and banner.

My campaigns will consist of 50% traffic going to landers and 50% directly to the offer page.

I was reading that in Voluum, there is a link (Under Setup>setting), that can be used instead of all the individual links of each campaign.

Do you know how to use it ? The description says:
"With Voluum you don't need to place any PHP code on your landing pages. Visitors are redirected based on data stored in a cookie and referrer.

If your landing page has a single offer placement (within which you can have one offer, or rotate many), use the "Click URL". If your LP displays more than one offer, use the multi-offer click URL with the number at the end being the offer №. For example, if your landing page displays three offers, you'll need to add click links that end with /click/1, /click/2 and /click/3. You will then need to add/edit the LP in Voluum and set the "Number of offers" to 3."

My LP's will have 1 offer but it's from 6 different networks as I want to split test them. What should I be using here and how exactly do I use it since it says "You don't need to place any php code on your landing page"? Should I be using this ?

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Thank you

Aris

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1. You need to track only three things : impressions, clicks, and conversions per site/traffic source
2. And knowing the pay out per conversion the only two metrics you'll need to look at are eCPM and Margin (% and absolute $)

So basically you track three things and analyze two, that's it. Simple comme bonjour.

All the other metrics are just 'interesting' but the above mentioned two will drive your business - many (new) affiliates make the mistake of overcomplicating things which makes them lost in analysis whereas they should be focusing on upscaling traffic, getting higher pay outs and increasing their Margin

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Home > Technical & Creative Skills > Tracking Campaigns