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Passing Traffic Source Tokens to Aff Network and Voluum (16)

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I’m not gonna lie, tracking has been a bitch to wrap my head around, and I even went to calculus drunk every morning and still passed. That’s been a few years though, and I’ve probably had some brain damage since then.

Okay, so when I set up Plenty of Fish as a traffic source in Voluum, I went to the "Advanced" section and had it include all the POF tokens. So let’s say I put in these tokens
{age:}{gender:}{creativeID:}
on my Traffic Source (POF) in Voluum. And that way I can see information about who’s clicking through to my landing page.

But what about when they click my landing page to go to the offer page? Will this info automatically pass —or do I need to manually place these tokens on Voluum’s Clikr URL and/or Offer URL for this campaign, as well?

And then when it comes to seeing info about conversions in my aff network reports—if I want to pass the age, gender, & creative ID for each conversion, do I need to manually add these POF tokens to my Offer ID in Voluum? And do I need to do it like “s2={age:}” in order for that info to pass all the way from my traffic source to the merchant page?

By the same token (harharhar), in order to see age, creative, etc. of conversions in Voluum, do I need to manusally add these tokens and/or a place for these tokens in my Voluum Click URL? And/or postback URL?

OR

Is this all taken care of when I add these tokens to my Traffic Source (in this case POF) in Voluum?

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Ok severian, I can see you are confused quite a bit here, so let me try to shed some light into your tracking concerns.

All the parts of the funnel have to work together in order for tracking to work properly. Source has to pass the info to the tracker, tracker can find some info on its own and affiliate network can only record what the trackers passes to it.

So you want to use the following tokens from POF : {age:}{gender:}{creativeID:}, you will use the first 3 custom variable fields in Voluum traffic source setup for this. Here is a screenshot for you from my Voluum setup, since I don't use POF I used some other network tho. Place the pof tokens in the middle, the left and right column are up to you to name somehow.



Now when you check a campaign link, you will see the tokens are already part of it. Use this link at the traffic source and they will automatically add these values and voluum will record them.


Now, if you want to pass these to the affiliate network, you have to do 2 things. First ask your aff network what placeholders/parameters you can use for that. s2 is usually reserved for clickid, so you might have to use s3,s4 or something totally different like k1, k2 , variable1, variable2 etc... this depends on the backend they are using.

Once you know what to use, you have to make it part of the OFFER URL in voluum and use the {var1}, {var2} and {var3} tokens. You must use var1 - var3 because we used the first 3 custom variables, understand?

Example : lets say the network tells you to use s3 - s5, you need to add this to the offer url : &s3={var1}&s4={var4}&s5={var5}

You can also add some more voluum tokens to the offer url, check the available ones when creating/editing an offer in voluum they are listed at the top. So the offer url can look like .... &s3={var1}&s4={var4}&s5={var5}&s6={browser}

Always ask the affiliate network how many you can use and whether they actually record them and use them for something. Because, in case they or the advertiser don't care, there is no point in passing this data to them. You will see all in voluum already, affiliates only pass this data to the network in case advertisers want to use it for placements optimization due to quality reasons.

Is it clear now or you need more clarification?

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Hi severian,

Just to elaborate a bit more on matuloo's great guidance -

In the case that you only need to correlate age, gender & creative ID performance with conversions, then there'll be no need to pass this data to the advertiser as you'll have it all within your Voluum reporting, ready to group as you see fit.
The main base to cover in this respect is to ensure that you have conversion tracking set correctly between the advertiser and Voluum.

Given with the parameters you have already supplied, I presume that the network uses CAKE.
In this case you will pass Voluum's click ID within your offer URLs via the parameter s2 - http://example.com?s2={clickid}

Then, within your Voluum postback URL, you will map the corresponding CAKE token to the cid parameter - https://______.voluumtrk.com/postback?cid=#s2#

As you can see, the correlation of parameters and tokens is something which is apparent across many platforms within the advertising ecosystem.
CAKE is expecting certain 3rd party strings to be relayed via their parameters (s2), the same strings can be passed on again to another party (or back to the source) with their matching internal token (#s2#).

Most networks work in the exact way by accepting data to be recorded via supported parameters, then allowing the user to do as they will with the data via the mapping of internal tokens to destination or postback URLs.
The exception in Voluum is that variable parameters can be customized for 3rd party (source) tokens, but the internal variable tokens will always remain fixed (relative to the custom variable field number or name defined within template). i.e. {var1} or {var:age}


Hope this helps and if you're ever in doubt, feel free to give us a shout. (PM or mail)


Kind regards,
Adrian

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Hell yes thank you. I actually had the first part down (or thought I did), but didn't know what the hell to do about it on down the funnel.

You cleared things up immensely, thank you!



Also I wasn't sure how important it was to send all of that info to network/merchant, and honestly I'd rather not share it all!


This is how I set up POF on Voluum earlier today:

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Thank you Adrian! This helps me understand a bit more.

I didn't want to pass everything to the network/advertiser, but didn't know if I -had- to in order to track the 3rd party info I wanted. I was worried about it getting lost once the visitor left the landing page--but I didn't take into account that there is a unique ID already associated with it, that is probably going to take care of this for me.

(Or maybe I've got it all wrong about how exactly this works...but I do think I've got enough info to get things up and running!)

Thank you both for the help, and for making sense out of my word salad here!

I've tried to read everything I can, before asking anyone to explain it to me, but this has just been more difficult to digest for whatever reason. Looks like I've got the info I need and I just need to get my tokens/variables set up, and run a short bit of traffic to make sure things are passing and tracking ok.

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So far I've just been doing direct links, with a different link for every creative (a system running Cake): offer.com/?&s2=PICTURE_1_HEADLINE_A, offer.com/?&s2=PICTURE_2_HEADLINE_A , etc. (Okay not quite that explicit, but you get the point).

It tells me which creatives are bringing the most conversions but it is kind of a pain in the ass tracking this way. And direct linking is obviously not going to work for me for this traffic/offer-type combo.

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Let me copy something from my blog so I don't have to retype it :

So yes, you got it right. The ID is stored in the DB along with all the info the tracker collected for that particular user and you can now look it all up.

Only pass data that the advertiser asks for or that can help you optimize the offer without being kicked from it. Usually they want sources/placements - so if they see some placement is very poor, they will tell you to pause just that and won't kick you from the offer. It's a good idea to send hard to identify parameters tho, we all heard stories about profitable campaigns being stolen...

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Setting up tracking can be a nerf wrecking thing but its something that is crucial for all your campaigns.
Here is a step by step guide on how to integrate Addiliate campaigns with Voluum. Should be easy like a sunday morning after reading this: http://support.addiliate.com/voluum-...sion-tracking/

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Thanks, I'm going to check that out too.

For any fellow confused affiliates in the future, I'm also reading this and it helps:

https://Voluum.com/user/guide.html

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Great resource - plus some really great bits of info shared by others here - glad you got things sorted out!

A couple of things to add:
1) if you're trying to get set up with tracking and a network, use your AM to help you out - Networks *SHOULD* know how to get things set up between their platform and many of the mainstream trackers, including Voluum
2) IF you do end up having issues with your tracker remember you are PAYING for it, so take full advantage of the support they provide to get things cleared up

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Thanks, I don't know why I didn't think to ask my AM first. Felt kinda bad asking here since I know the answer is out there somewhere....but my brain just finally locked up on me. Between this thread (I'm buying everybody a beer and/or food at a conference in the future, for sure!), Mobidea's video, http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread...Guide-Part-Two , and Voluum's user guide, I've just about got it down.

I know who's visiting my lander, anyway. I'm not 100% sure how to look for who's visiting the offer page, but I may not be looking at the right stuff. And I can't tell who's converting because my micro tests ahven't brough back a conversion yet . But that will improve.

Anyways, I am going to write my AMs today to make sure I've got everything 100%. All I need to make sure of now is that my offer URL & postback URL look right.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel!

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Voluum doesn't have an option to analyze this, at least I don't know about it. You want to analyze who clicked through, which would mean grouping data by "clicks" and that's not possible. You don't really need this tho, as you need to optimize for conversions and not click throughs, so don't worry about it.

As for postback URL, try to ask your AM if they can fire the postback for you for a test the conversion reporting, they usually can do this.

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I found out Voluum has a reporting API:
http://feedback.Voluum.com/knowledge...-reporting-api

How do I get my token to authenticate? I searched through Voluum there and back twice and didn't find anything.
Also there's no documentation about this at all.

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Hi Azureus,

Authentication tokens are (log-in) session based and can be generated / retrieved via a call to our security/log-in service.

This is outlined within this article with a cURL example provided.

Here it's broken down into parts -

Request URL: https://security.voluum.com/login
Request Method: GET
Auth: Basic username:'password' (Base64 encoded without ' ')

Auth token will be returned in response body (see example below using Postman)


Postman is a nice client to run requests with different variables in consecutive order (queue).

Admittedly, our API documentation is lacking at the moment. This will be alleviated with the opening of all API via swagger. - Screen
This will provide a breakdown of all possible requests and permit testing direct from the API console provided inline within swagger.

As is, the majority of services / requests are listed, but it won't become publicly available until we make changes for a centric API gateway across all services.
I'll get a status update on this sometime this week and let you know when this is expected to be published.


Hope this helps and feel free to ping me if you'd like some further guidance in exploring and invoking our API.

Regards,
Adrian

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HOLY CRAP

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Awesome stuff!

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