Home > Technical & Creative Skills > Tracking Campaigns

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Basic Tracker For This Purpose? (11)

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Hi Guys,

We have a blog, social media profiles (facebook, instaegram) and have clients who pay us money to advertise on these platforms.

We want to track the number of aggregate clicks we send to their websites. So clicks from Facebook, the website, Instagram, email, etc.

Any recommended platforms to do this, something not too expensive?

Other things we want to do:

1) We also eventually want to track conversions, to see if our traffic is leading them to conversions. I'm assuming we would need them to install some pixel to their conversion page to see this.

2) We want the referral of traffic to be our website/brand e.g. if the traffic is coming from Instagram we want it to show in the clients analytics as our website/brand and not Instagram.

Cheers.

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You could do most of this with any basic tracker, simply setup a different campaign for every traffic channel and use the specific campaign urls to send traffic from each of them. Then you can check stats for each campaign separately. You could also setup your various properties as "traffic sources" withing the tracker and send all the traffic into one campaign. Then just check the stats per traffic source.

There would be one problem though, you would have to use some tracking domain and that would probably show up as the referring site, not the web property that the click comes from.

Another option would be to simply use UTM tags and have the clients check stats in their google analytics accounts. Here is a basic UTM link generator: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/

NOTE: with GA, the numbers would look lover for sure, GA doesn't count raw hits as the standard affiliate trackers we are using.

As for the conversions, with the UTM setup, the conversion tracking could be handled by GA too, it just requires some setup on the clients side.

With an affiliate tracker, you would have to send your clients the postback url and they would have to put it into whatever type of "post purchase/post conversion" thank you page they have. So it would get launched whenever a conversion happens. For this to work properly, they also need to grab the clickID from your link and attach that at the end of the postback url automatically.

This will be hard with instagram, since many of the IG posts are designed to promote the IG profile of the client, plus there are restrictions on what links are clickable... so not much to track here in many cases. For the clickable links, you could use 1 of the approaches I described above too.

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Thanks Matuloo!

Contacted clickmetre and said they"Well you use Hide referral feature to hide all the traffic sources. So that the information is not revealed to the advertiser". Apparently you can also use a custom URL

Clickmeter is $29.99 a month and $99 for normal, are there better tracking platforms i should consider which might be cheaper or better for the same price?

I do plan on doing aggressive affiliate marketing later on but client come first.

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I'm not familiar with clickmeter so can't really comment. But I did take a look at their pricing and the $29 plan only includes 25.000 events, which is a VERY low number. Not sure how they count the events, but if it's the standard way ... 1 event is the click sent to the campaign url, another event is the click redirected to the offer ... that would translate to like 400 visits handled per day and that's absolutely not sufficient.

If we look at the competitors, even Voluum (which is one of the more expensive ones) has a started plan with 1.000.000 events included at $69 or you could go with a self hosted one like funnelflux, where it's $99 a month for the licence plus some hosting fee and then the only limit on the events is how much the host can handle.

There also other options like redtrack for cloud hosted or Binom as selfhosted ... many options to choose from and it's really hard to say which one is the best.

But clickmeter doesn't sound like a good option due to it's price, even the $99 plan still has just 200.000 events and that's not enough for your future AM campaigns for sure.

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RedTrack.io is looking good thanks for the recommendation (if any discount promo codes hit us up!), same price point and much more events.

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There are some STM promo codes in the official announcement thread from RedTrack guys: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...cking-solution

I hope they still work

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Hi Guys,

Question:


We want to setup a custom domain for tracking to make the links look user friendly, is there any risk using our own domain name (which is our main website) or can we simply purchase a throwaway domain (similar name to our website) and use that for tracking?

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I'm not that of an expert when it comes to hosting/DNS stuff, but I don't think you can actually operate a full website on a domain and at the same time use it as the tracking domain. But even if it was possible, it's still a much better idea to use a separate domain for tracking. You never know what could go wrong with a campaign, it might get flagged from whatever reason and thats not something you want to happen to your main domain. You can use something similar to your main domain so it looks trustworthy to anyone who'd look at the tracking link, but most people won't even notice since the redirect happens fast and then they land on the landing page.

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Just some food for thought.

All the major browsers have indicated that they will be blocking 3rd party tracking.

Chrome just made the announcement a few days ago. https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/07/go...printing-tech/

I anticipated this would eventually happen, which is why Prosper202 comes with an unlimited domain and server license. To allow you to use it on every domain you own without having to pay more.

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I've been just reading some other article about the planned chrome updates and was wondering how it would affect tracking. Since you have a ton of experience with this @Mr-Baffoe and a deep understanding of the subject, can you tell us more about the possible effect this could have on the most popular trackers like Voluum for example? I'm not sure how much they rely on cookie tracking, but I guess you could know indeed. Thanks!

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There are two issues to get solved here:

1. Your tracker being able to attribute all sales and conversions
2. Your affiliate network being able to attribute all sales and conversions (this is where it gets really messy)

On the tracker side. Custom domains could fix some of the issues, if you depend on pixels for conversion tracking, the sale needs to happen in 7 days and you'll have no problem. Beyond that, no attribution will happen. The apparent work around would be to use postbacks since that's "cookieless"

But "cookieless" really just means that the network software can ping your tracking software to mark a conversion without using cookies. BUT the network software still needs cookies to work to identify the person that converted so they can trigger the "cookieless" postback.

Fingerprinting is out of the question, because all browsers are taking active steps to make them less effective. Affiliates will love all the free money and conversion from people who they didn't really send to the offer, but networks and offer owners(advertisers) are going to get bankrupt from all the duplicate conversions if they are 100% depending on finger printing for attribution.

But the problem here is that your network needs to also be able to attribute past the 7 day mark. At the network level, it gets worse. Most networks are the 3rd party javascript on the merchant page. So problem 1 is that cookies never get set when your traffic hits the offer page.

They can get around this by providing a custom sub-domain, this could fix the no cookie issue. I say could because, the browsers could choose to classify subdomains as 3rd party to the main domain.

Coming in soon, any link with url variables will have cookies capped at a 1 day life if the redirect happened from a url determined to have cross-site tracking capabilities (aka all affiliate tracking links)

Having a Self-hosted tracker doesn't fix everything, but it fixes a lot in ways that hosted trackers can't fix.
1. Hosted trackers are going to have to allow the ability to use unlimited custom tracking urls. Either free or paid. This could break if browsers start tracking subdomains as 3rd party urls. Self-hosted trackers can usually be installed on a subdomain, making all tracking 1st party.
2. Hosted trackers are going to have to find a way to set server side cookies to be able to bypass the 7 day cookie limitation for ios and desktop safari. With the rise of mobile, this is something that can't be ignored. Self hosted trackers can set server-side cookies for the domain without the use of javascript.

If there ever was a case to run for the hills screaming "affiliate marketing is dead", this would be it lol.

But seriously, it's not really all going to die. There will be some casualties. The overhaul needed to make attribution work could kill some networks, trackers and eventually affiliates. When the offer that makes you all your money can't attribute 30-100% of your sales, you can see how you could wipe you out overnight.

Choose your partners wisely, now's the time to interrogate them to see what they are doing about this. Pro Tip: Don't take a simple "It's addressed and we are not affected" for an answer. Ask what's being done specifically to address the all the issues I outlined.

2019 and beyond is certainly going to be "interesting" for all of us

Further reading:
Firefox:
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurerelea...anti-tracking/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/..._access_policy
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/0...alue-exchange/

Webkit (this powers safari on ios and desktop)
https://webkit.org/blog/category/privacy/

Chrome also powers Brave (already a highly secure browser the strips out tracking), and the new Microsoft edge browser
https://blog.chromium.org/2019/05/im...ty-on-web.html
https://web.dev/samesite-cookies-explained/
https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/whats-next
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/...mode-devtools/
https://brave.com/features/

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