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How to track costs using Propeller Ads? (17)

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I've been struggling with this one (and with popCash as well)...how do you track what the impressions are costing you, particularly when direct linking? So far ive had to go in after the fact and manuall update costs..with a tracking system, this is kinda dumb.

There doesnt seem a way to set a cost per visit...

No matter what i put for costs, it just doesnt seem to automatically track it. to do CPM you need to do some kinda tracking pixel? and Propeller says they dont do that..

im at a loss..can anyone help?

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You have to treat this as a CPC campaign and set Voluum to manually track costs... for the CPC cost use your bid/1000, since yuo are bidding for 1000 pops. Once they start flowing, check how much you were billed for, check how many visits Voluum recorded, divide the cost by the visits and there you have a more realistic CPC to use. Please note that there will always be some clickloss, so numbers at the traffic sources will be higher than what voluum records ... this is normal as long as it's not more than 15-20%.

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thats just so ghetto..you'd think a service that costs 99 bucks a month and is built on mobile pops would be able to simply count visitors and use that to track costs.

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It's not technically possible, because of the clickloss. If there was no clickloss it would work flawlessly - you would simply set the rate to match the bid and that would be it. Voluum counts visitors that reach it, but since they do not match with what the traffic source will charge you for ... you have to do the adjustment I told you about. Moreover, the price you pay per 1000 pops isn't constant, since it's all about bidding and the prices go up and down all the time. The only solution would be if the traffic sources passed exact cost of every visit, which they don't ... and then again, it wouldn't be accurate since some part of the traffic get's lost

This is one of the annoyances of AM that you need to learn to live with and work with some tolerance for error.

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Ah, I hope they did.

Btw there is something you can do if you know people who can code.
I was thinking about this a few days ago.
You know how to work with Rest API's?

Here is the Voluum API - https://developers.Voluum.com/#/
If you look down at REPORTS section they are giving out the entire report.
If you filter the report you can find the revenue, visits, clicks .etc that you can get from the API.

Now usually, most traffic sources have API's too.
I do not work with PropellerAds but this link says that the support team can help - https://support.propellerads.com/ind...rticle/View/33

Usually other traffic sources that i work with give public access to there API's. For example:
TrafficJunky - http://api.trafficjunky.com/api/doc/
Exoclick - https://www.exoclick.com/ad-network/api/
And they give out cost data here.

So now you have cost from TrafficSource API and revenue from Voluum API. You can bring them together to make very nice reports.
Do you want an auto bidder? You can make that too.
How about alerts/pause campaigns when ROI goes negative suddenly? That can be done.

I am sure many affiliates are doing this by hiring programmers or building a tech team, because there are so many other things you can do with technology. Some of these things can reduce so many man hours of work, and allow you to manage more campaigns than any person could.

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Indeed, APIs can help, but as you said yourself, it requires custom coding, which is can get costly ... but yes, automation is definitely on the rise.

For a simpler version, excel sheets can work pretty well ... download the csv reports from both sources and Voluum and compare them in a sheet - it requires a bit advanced excel skills, but works just fine

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inferno, if I recall, you were asking about automation in another thread, so I assume you know at least a bit of programming? If so, I'd also echo Don's statements and take the API route. Not just for updating costs, but for pausing placements, changing bids, stopping campaigns, etc. Of course, would only do this once you're at a stage where you know all the steps of finding successful campaigns and knowing how to optimise and (maybe) scale.

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It’s almost end of 2017 and while automation tools are showing pretty impressive results through their early days of use, it’s a waste of time and budget rebuilding a custom private tool to keep track of accurate cost/rev and automation.

Just be aware of the maintenance costs, complex infrastructure and overall performance & reliability.

In these competitive days, having a custom coded tool (including maintenance) is a heavy weight for your ROI, when you can pay for a fraction of it using 3rd party tools.

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We totally understand your pain and disappointment. However, at this point we are unable to track precise costs from Propeller Ads, since those guys don't have a specific token for the costs. At this point of time there are two workarounds for this, which are not perfect, but still can be used. First one, as you said, is a manual cost update. It is not too comfortable, but gives you a bit more clear picture on your spendings in that TS. Second one is selecting an autoupdate of the costs and put the average bid in it. This method will save you some time, but again, as Matuloo mentioned, bid fluctuations will shuffle a picture a little bit.

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As mentioned before APIs are very helpful here.

What I did with other source is that I automatically pull costs everyday from traffic source and do a cost update through API to Voluum.
I am also able to run this retrospectively for past days.
These things can save up a lot of time and confusion, so it's definitely worth investing into if you plan to stay in this game for the longterm.

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Just a note from a mistake I recently made. I tried to do CPM cost tracking which I thought would be able to track every visitor and assign them the cpm that I was paying on the TS. But once you enable impression tracking the URL changes to 2 separate url's both of which both are needed on the TS. I wasted quite a bit before I realised the link wasn't going anywhere. What made me even more annoyed is that when I changed the url and the camp went back into "waiting for approval" mode it was then approved despite the link clearly not working...

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From what we understand, when you had launched impression tracking, we offered you two separate links. One of them was the postback, which you needed to implement into TS for the impression tracking itself, and the other one, with no tokens, would have served as a campaign URL. The postback link won't send people anywhere indeed, since it just parses the information from TS to Voluum.

To start the impression tracking, change your campaign URL to the link 1, and then implement the second one as a postback for your tracking pixel in your TS.

Attachment 17324

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I just seen that they now have the cost token available for Smartcpm campaigns, this might help getting the costs in Voluum?

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Is this token available/working only on SmartCPM campaigns? I doubt it will deliver an accurate cost to your tracker, since such tokens are available on other traffic sources like PopAds, PopCash, Plugrush, etc and the cost is just close to the real one.

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From what I can see it is only available for Smartcpm campaigns.

I think most affiliates will be running Smartcpm campaigns due to the option that you can pause targets.

Smartcpm might be interesting for tools like yours, costs can be tracked and individual targets can be paused.

I guess that this can be automated and integrated via their API.

Not sure, just a guess

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Yep, accurate cost per publisher is pretty important when there are different pricing levels from different pubs so you don't generalize the traffic cost per pubs.
And yes again, it can be automate through API and have a sharp view of cost/ROI on publisher level

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Launched a campaign using the Propeller cost token and the costs are automatically being tracked in Voluum, problem solved!

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