What is a Postback: A Simple Explanation for Starters, Newbs, First-Timers into AM (9)
What is a Postback: A Simple Explanation for Starters, Newbs, First-Timers into AM
This guide is for people completely new to the world of Affiliate Marketing and a little confused about all this talk of tracking, postbacks, leads - this is for all the newbs that just really want to understand the basics so they can get into the game.
Everything on the web is tracked and your data is used to help promote and sell products and services. Ever wonder how it’s done? Here’s a quick breakdown - which will also be useful for any new Affiliate Marketer.
What are Cookies & Postbacks:
Most of us are familiar with cookie based tracking. You can think about this like unintentionally leaving a trail of breadcrumbs - the cookies are markers stored in your browser history, that can keep track of all the places/website you have been too [within reason - there are data limits but we’re not going to get too technical here]. When you return to a webpage, the web page knows from your previous cookies - they even track all the various parts of the site you go to, how long you spend on specific pages - that cookie allows a website to understand your user behaviour regarding their product. This cookie information becomes invaluable when retargeting ads on other websites you visit to reminding you to buy that bag or sign up for that netflix subscription.
A postback is different from cookie based tracking - instead of leaving a cookie on someone’s browser, you are using a unique click id to pass through each link hop.This information is used to follow a user’s flow from their initial view of a page, onwards. Postback tracking is particularly important to those marketing and advertising online - understanding the data surrounding the user behaviour is the basis of performance driven marketing. This data can be used to optimize the user experience to help get what you want from the user such as, more page views, user registration or a product sale.
Postback tracking has become a standard due to the increase in mobile traffic combined with an inability for mobile cookies, as well as the increasing prevalence in cookie blocking browser extensions on desktop.
This tracking can start from the moment the user enters a webpage but specifically, this tutorial is going to explain the use of postback tracking for an online or mobile media buyer, doing Affiliate Marketing.
First, let’s define some terms:
Mobile and online media buyers purchase ad space - ads on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, ads on search engines like google, bing and on your everyday popular websites that have integrated with the many ad exchanges & programmatic traffic desks selling banner space and even pop-ups.
Affiliate Marketer or Affiliate is an individual or company that purchases online & mobile media space, like banners, search ads and pop ups. Unlike the generic term “Media Buyer”, affiliates, are not doing branding campaigns for advertisers, they are generating users & sales.
Affiliate Network is a one-stop shop for a variety of offers for an affiliate marketer to advertise. F5 Media specifically specialized in Mobile Content, Sweepstakes & Pay Per Call campaigns.
Cost Per Action, better known as CPA, refers to being paid on an action - instead of paying for impressions or clicks, the advertiser only pays upon user registration, a product sale, an install of a mobile application, etc.
When an action occurs, we call this a “conversion” or a “lead”. Affiliates Marketers are media buyers that primarily work on a CPA basis - this means in order to have a positive return on their media buys, they need the total amount of leads to make more money than what they spend on ads.
A post back is going to be used to track the original click to the conversions, and ultimately helps the affiliate optimize their online or mobile campaign.
Both the Affiliate Network and Affiliate will be using Tracking Platforms to track the clicks, and leads alongside device data like the operating system, carrier/isp,, user location [IP]. The affiliate will specifically use this information, cross reference it with their rotation of ads and ad placements, to help optimize their success and weed out what is not working. In short, an Affiliate uses this optimization data to increase their volume of leads and ROI.
Now onto the fun stuff - how does all this tracking and online marketing really make people money online?
The Affiliate is first going to pick an offer from an Affiliate Network like us at F5 Media, and choose an appropriate traffic source to buy ad space. There are lots of steps in here for setting up your campaign on your tracker, with the tracking source but that’s for an entirely different tutorial 
So let’s assume your campaign is properly set up and you’re ready to launch it on the greater internet users of the world. Well… Great! People start seeing your ad based on the impressions you’ve purchased with your ad network of choice… but now what happens when a user clicks your ad, and initiates the tracking process…
When a user clicks an ad on a website or in a mobile application, the user is redirected a webpage or the webpage opened up in a separate tab. This establishes the first user click and interaction with the advertisement and where the unique click ID is originally going to be established.
While the page is loading, even if you don’t notice it, hops in the link are happening - passing the unique click ID through one or many tracking systems - The Affiliate Tracker to the Affiliate Network Tracker - to the Advertiser tracker - now the user sees the offer.
As we obviously know by now, the purpose of sending the user to the “Offer Page” is to have them do something - buy something, sign up for a service, download an app - once this action has taken place, the owner of this “offer page”, who we refer to as the “advertiser”, will fire back a postback to let us know if a lead has occurred. Just how the initial click hops through multiple systems, to fire the lead back we are going to send that information in reverse: Advertiser Tracker - Affiliate Network - Affiliate Tracker.
I know I’m totally negating the use of a “Pre-Lander” or sales flow before the user reaches the offer page - but I wanted to make this easier to start, focusing on direct linking from a banner. Once you understand this concept of passing a unique click id this way, you can then look into how a pre-lander or sales flow would fit into where the click ID is passed.
This all came from my blog: jaimmie.tumblr.com
Now that you [hopefully] understand what a postback is, click here to understand all you need to know about tracking from Caurmen's Amazing Thread.
Thank you so much for this thorough post. It is absolutely enlightening for a newbie such as myself !
Originally Posted by imchoon
Hey Jaimmie that's truly awesome guide
Thumb up!
We would like to add F5 to
Let me know pls if you are interested
Originally Posted by alexom
Thumb up!We would like to add F5 to
Let me know pls if you are interested
I left F5 end of February, so can't help you out there anymore. You can email them at network@f5media.com.
Otherwise you can check our www.JaimmieRiley.com for my services
That's some serious art work! Thanks for this very useful post, time to bookmark !
ok, thanks, i'll take a look
Originally Posted by alexom
Thumb up!We would like to add F5 to
Let me know pls if you are interested
I just PM'd you - feel free to fire me a message back and we can work on this together!
H
Thank you!! thank you!! This post really made it clear to me now.
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