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How to keep track of cost discrepancy between traffic source and Voluum? (5)

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I realised there has been 10-20% discrepancy in terms of the "cost" between my traffic sources like PopAds / DNTX and Voluum.

For example DNTX would report to Voluum $200 in revenue and $150 in cost, which seems like a profit. But when I check to DNTX directly, it has already spent $250 in cost , which in turn makes this still a losing campaign.

With the number of campaigns/timezones/offers etc, how do you keep track of the exact cost of the traffic source to ensure that your campaigns are actually profitable?

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We use a giant spreadsheet that gets updated with the overall spend on each source at the end of each day, which gives a good holistic view.
As far as tracking individual campaign spend, you're going to have to check it manually when required - if tracking integration is off, there's not really any other easy solution (that I can think of).

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Add the discrepancy on top of your cpm in volume. For example, if your cpm is 1$ and the daily discrepancy about 20%, your cpm in volume would be 1.2$.

This way, you have an almost correct value during the day to make educated decisions.

Next day use the cost update function in volume to overwrite the almost correct value with the 100% correct value from the traffic source.

If you want to be absolute correct, this would be as well the time to add an markup for currency conversion, payment and banking fees.

Was wondering for a long time why Volume was green, but my bank account wouldn't grow. This way, what you see in volume is what you see on your bank account.

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I'm doing the same.

In many ways, the middleman (the tracker) doesn't have the precise costs, nor the precise revenue... (somehow I always get some "revenue postback loss")

So I built a spreadsheet based on copy/paste (so dependent on the traffic source, which makes things complex when you have many sources at once) from both the real costs source (traffic source) and the real revenue source (network).

Of course I make sure to have all in UTC time (lots of source will give you UTC costs, and most "not too dumb" networks will let you choose the timezone to get your precise revenue).

Cheers,

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The numbers in your tracking will never be accurate, it simply isnt possible. Especially not when you are bidding on a CPM basis. The best you can do is adjust them based on the data you collect during the day but even in that case you will not reach 100% acuracy.

What I personally do is this : I use the cpc model in Voluum for example, I take the total daily spend for a campaign, divide it by the number of clicks Voluum recorded and use that number as the CPC value. This way I have pretty much an acurate number for the whole campaign. This is good enough to quickly spot campaigns that I have problems with and need to optimize. When optimizing it tho, I pull cvs reports from traffic source and voluum and use excell to pair revenue and ad spend per spot - this is pretty much the only way to get the exact numbers and see what spots drain your budget. And even this isnt 100% acurate as some leads/conversions will not be reported to the tracking

Its simply not possible to get this work 100%, get used to it

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