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Hate manually tracking Taboola and Revcontent costs? So does Voluum (12)

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Voluum is now integrated with Taboola and Revcontent so you don’t have to manually update costs, saving you time on a boring task.

“Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined.” ― Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

Taboola and Revcontent are among these traffic sources which are not able to send cost information in a token. So up until now, you had to regularly log in to their platforms, check your cost for a particular campaign and then manually input it in your tracker to know just how profitable the campaign was and keep the numbers accurate. Also, you had to repeat these steps as many times as many campaigns you had running.

Our new beta feature does this manual update for you.

From now on, your campaigns’ numbers in the tracker can be accurate without you going through this boring and repetitive process yourself. Benefit? You get the time you used to spend on it back for good!

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Voluum hasn’t found a miracle solution - just as before your costs aren’t constantly up-to-date and these traffic source platforms still are not able to send the final cost value that you pay for each visitor's click to the tracker due to number of reasons.
Voluum’s simply decided to automate the process on our end and update your costs for you every day.

HOW TO SET IT UP?

1. Before you perform an integration, make sure that you have an API key to authenticate Voluum's requests in your traffic source's account:
   
   
   • For Taboola: You can get it by contacting their support.
     Write an email to support@taboola.com with the following message.
     
     
     Hello
     I would like to request the client ID and client secret for my account.
     Kind regards,
     
     
   • For Revcontent: You can find your API key in Settings, under Stats API Credentials / OAuth.
   
   
2. Once ready, the steps to add integration in Voluum are quite simple:
   
   Click the Add integration button in Integrations tab in Voluum’s settings.
   Click the + Add new integration link under the appropriate traffic source.
   Provide your client ID and client secret.
   Select which campaigns should have their costs integrated by removing or providing relevant Voluum campaign IDs.
   Select an integration status. If you keep the integration status as active, the cost update will be performed immediately after you finish setup.
   Click the Finish button.

Done! Your cost information for the selected campaigns will now be updated, starting from yesterday's costs.

Still have a question on any of this? Our Knowledge Base (https://doc.Voluum.com/en/traffic_source_integration.html) explains it in more details. Or ask me here, I'll let you know!

Karolina

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Absolutely amazing, just integrated it and costs seem to be displayed accurately
I was definitely waiting for either revcontent or Voluum to come up with a solution for this

Edit: I just realized that the costs are updated by campaign level alone, therefore cost by widget is not displayed accurately.
Are there plans for the near to have Voluum pull cost values per widget?

Also, how often is data updated? I see that my previous day costs have been updated, but today still hasn't (It's been around half an hour since Revcontent has been integrated)
The documentation says "will keep updating cost every short period of time", is there a more specific time frame to how frequently costs update?

Thanks

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Nice. What about Google / FB ?


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

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How accurate is this for drill-down reports?

Is it just giving you the accurate total cost and cost per placements/widgets via their apis, or is it going a step further and using their click logs?

Eg, if I were were to have several countries in one campaign for example, would it show the accurate stats per country or would be averaged?

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I Checked it earlier, they are pulling data on the campaign level alone.

When I looked at costs per widget (and drilled down into variables in general) it displays the cost based on the average campaign visit cost (total cost / visits)
So far it seems no different then updating costs manually, I hope they can start pulling cost data by widget in the future

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Since this feature is still in the Beta version - for now the cost values are pulled on a campaign level. Integration updates yesterday's cost and keeps updating it periodically (every 2 hours) and uploading it to Voluum. The reasoning behind it is simple - because the report in TS platforms might change during the actual day (TSs can make corrections of reports), we want to be as exact as possible.

So every 2 hours, Voluum calls Taboola / Revcontent's API to ask about costs generated in your campaigns yesterday and updates your stats with data received in the response. As you've already noticed - it works in the same way as Manual Cost Update, though as its automated version. We are still developing it, so your feedback and suggestions are very valuable here.

So far we've integrated with these 2 TSs but there are definitely plans to involve more! Google / FB suggestion - noted ✔! But since we're on the topic - let me know what it is you specifically want in terms of any TS including Google. We will check how can we help you achieve it!

And, of course, once there's any update and new TS is added to the list, I'll let you know first

Integration doesn't match costs of every visit, but updates the total cost generated by each campaign. That causes cost to be accurate on a global report for campaigns level only. The more you dig in to specific reports for different elements and the more grouping or drill-down option you apply, the less accurate costs will be in this detailed view. Cost values that you will see in the specific report will be estimated.

As underlined before, I really appreciate all the suggestions and questions I received so far. I'm working closely with people who introduced this feature and they will be seriously considered in planning the next steps! So if there's anything else that's bothering you or anything you want to request, pls let me know.

Karolina

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I've been using this with Revcontent, and it appears to be updating once per day only (I noticed that specifically at 23:00 EST) for the previous 24 hours

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It updates yesterday's cost every 2 hours
If your campaigns' costs update only once per day (let's say at 23:00 EST) - it doesn't mean that we haven't called Revcontent's API since (after 23:00 EST), as we do it every 2 hours, it means the data we received in responses hasn't changed.

I know it might seem unintuitive at first and we are actually considering changing it - we definitely want the updates to be done in the most optimal frequency and for the best time range from your perspective.

It's problematic, as cost values might change on the TS's side a few times during the day, to find the best time for the automated update - I'm sure you have different times and techniques for checking the costs yourself.
We first came up with the idea to check the reports not for the actual day, but for the previous day, as they are more accurate then. Though checking them only once daily wasn't enough - hence the later solution of 2-hour ranges.

Now, one of the things we're considering is keeping the updates every 2 hours but changing them from the updates of yesterday's data to today's data so it's even more one to one. What do you think about this solution? Or are uptades of yesterday's costs fine by you? Let me know what you think.

Karolina

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Sorry I made a mistake about the hour at which it updates, it actually updates 00:00 EST for the previous day which makes more sense as Revcontent is displaying stats in EST

But regardless, I believe this is not the case on my end



Here is an example of one of my campaigns today - you can see that costs (red line) stops updating after 6am my tracker time (that's after 00:00 when converted to EST) while the campaign is still running as usual.
And based on how it updated over the past few days, I expect it to update tomorrow at 00:00 EST for the previous day (today)

Comparing to the current solution we use to track accurate costs via API which is theoptimizer.io, where I believe costs are updated every couple of minutes making it possible to track current day performance accurately.

I would love to see costs update much more frequently on Voluum as well. I believe it's a great initiative on your end but the current frequency makes current day campaign stats appear very inaccurate

e.g - my tracker is set up to my local time zone (EST + 6), so the tracker displays revcontent costs up until 6 am my time while displaying revenue from the full day making my ROI appear much higher than it actually is

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Let me explain it on an example so we're on the same page about it

For now, it works like this:
Let's say you integrate Revcontent at 8:43 on 12/3. So at roughly (might be a few minutes later) 8:43 on 12/3 we update the costs for the whole day of 11/3. Then at roughly 10:43, we check the costs for the whole day of 11/3 again, and update them in Voluum if they had changed since we previously updated them at 08:43.. Same at 12:43, 14:43, etc. At 22:43 on 12/3 we check the costs for the whole day of 11/3 for the last time and update their values in Voluum. Then at 00:43 on 13/3 we update the costs for the whole day of 12/3 and the process starts all over again, this time for costs for 12/3.

So yes, since the current day starts at 00:00 and we update yesterday's costs only, from 00:00 EST you don't see any values being added to Voluum for this day. They will be added all at once with the first update the next day. I believe we were trying to say the same thing, just the way we used to describe it was different.

Yes, I'm aware of this problem and I agree the next step would be to have the costs accurate not for the previous day but for the current day.

If you want to have any costs for the current day (and not the previous day) tracked in Voluum, for now, apart from the integration you should select the cost model on the campaign level. Then you will see the costs during the day and when the day ends, the integration will update them with the actual values it will get from Revcontent.

Karolina

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I misunderstood then, but it's all clear now. Thanks for the detailed explanation

The issue is that revcontent does not pass click costs to the tracker, making it impossible to select "auto" as a cost model
And due to how dynamic click costs could be, using static CPC as a cost model is simply irrelevant as discrepancies between traffic source and tracker would be huge to say the least

That's awesome, I'm really looking forward to that

Thank you

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As I've mentioned already, the integration is a work in progress (as it's a beta feature).

We're considering different options for its development, and for sure looking at what you're saying (thanks @daanja, @thedudeabides and @sotiris for your contribution! Much appreciated ).

Starting today, beside updating costs for the previous day (that's how it's worked so far), the integration is also updating the current day's costs every 2 hours making it possible to track current day's performance more accurately.

Karolina

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