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Light bulb! When tracking links and postback URLs finally made sense... (9)

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The $1 Guide and this subforum has been amazing. So many things have fallen into place for me as I've been following along and running my test campaigns. The amount of education I've been getting with my head buried in my tracker this week pouring over the (super cheap) data I've been getting has been so priceless and I'm looking forward to really knuckling down on the 40 Day Tutorial in the next few weeks.

I’m still very new to affiliate marketing and some of my learning curves have been pretty steep. One of the hardest things I've struggled with IMMENSELY has been URLs and tracking tokens… but this week I had a light bulb moment – which is what I want to share in the hope that it might help someone else unlock some inspiration if they're struggling to understand URLs as much as I was.

I mean, I read this tutorial about 20 times:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...-Read-This-Now

…but I just couldn't get anything to really click.

I’d be reading a guide or post and I’d be following along with this or that and just when I thought I had it figured out there’d be something like, “…don’t forget to add &tid=[IMPRESSIONID] at the end of the offer URL”.

…and I’d be like, “OK, I get the [IMPRESSIONID] is a PopAds token (and I’d give myself a big pat on the back for even knowing that much), but why is the parameter name ‘tid’? Where did that come from? Why isn’t it ‘sid’ like it was in the last follow along? Or ‘s2’ like that post I read last week?



It seems like tracking URLs roll off most affiliate’s tongues like they’re at Starbucks ordering their morning iced half caff ristretto venti 4-pump sugar free cinnamon dolce soy skinny latte… but it was all just gibberish to me.

Then one day last week, I was setting up a new traffic source and something just clicked.

Here’s what the new traffic source set up screen looks like in FunnelFlux if you’re setting up MGID:




Which suddenly reminded me of something I’ve seen a thousand times:




And the thing that clicked for me was that the registration form above is simply a way for a website to capture information for its database, where it’s directing the user to enter the information it wants for its various slots: Name, Company, Email and Phone.

And that’s when I realised that’s what tracking tokens are doing and that's what I was setting up in the new traffic source screen – I was simply identifying the names of the slots and the required information to be entered into each slot (I know that this is explained in the guide in the link at the beginning of this post, but I think I just couldn’t wrap my head around it because I had nothing familiar to relate it to... until now!)

I guess what I really saw when I pictured an online registration form in my mind was that instead of requiring some dude to fill out a form with the data my tracker wants (and he’d never do that, obviously) I can simply "ask" the database from the traffic network or affiliate network (that has already captured information about the dude) to do me a favour and “fill out the form for him” so to speak.

And if it wasn't complicated by the fact that different databases call the same thing different names then I think I might have appreciated this sooner, but all those different terms just kept doing my head in!!!!

But when I thought of that registration form I also saw that if it needed to explain to users how to fill it out in a different language then it could possibly look like this:



It just seems so obvious now and I'm really glad I struggled through it.

And just as an example, in case the registration form analogy above isn't making sense, where my tracker is hosted on www .coolevent .com (and the slots in my database are called the name on the LHS in the form above) and if visitors are going to be coming from www .eventdirectory .com (and the description in the RHS grey boxes above are the tokens for its corresponding slots) then I can create this URL:

https: //www .coolevent .com/?name={whatchacalled}&company={yabidness}&email={inboxinfo}&phone={demdigits}

Of course, the reverse is also true. If I’m sending the dude from my tracker to the offer and I want to pass the info I have about the dude, then I do the reverse:

https: //www .eventdirectory .com/?whatchacalled={name}&yabidness={company}&inboxinfo={email}&demdigits={phone}

Now I know some of you guys are casually sipping on your iced half caff ristretto ventis and you're shrugging and wondering what all the fuss is about, but I just feel so much relief since this seems to have sunk in. In fact, after I started to get a sense that I was getting on top of it I started drawing out some scenarios to see if I was missing anything. I even created a whole story about a dude called Bob and his wonderful adventures in my funnel and every time Bob visited I was able to track him from start to finish without getting totally confused.

This is one of my tidier efforts (most of my scribbling was pretty frantic and illegible in all my excitement)



So that’s it. My light bulb.

I really hope it might help someone in some way if you’re still struggling with this insane URL stuff – even if it just serves to give you confidence that one day, maybe right out of the blue, it WILL all make sense and you’ll finally be able to relax and just get on with it.

Just don't give up struggling. Ever.

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HOLY SHIT if that's not the BEST illustration of how tracking works I'm EVER seen!!

And with all your tact and graphics skills, you have all the making of an awesome marketer! I'm so glad for you that you're in this business.

That is EXACTLY what tracking is!! And what a brilliant way to explain it!

I'm proud, and I'm sure caurmen is as well!

I'm linking from the 40-day tutorial to your post - and will be featuring it in the next issue of the STM newsletter.

Thanks so much for all the time you've taken to put the post together!



Amy

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Seriously?! WOW

Thanks for responding Amy. Your guides are absolute game changers.

The process of just writing out that post helped me reconfirm to myself that I really did <FINALLY> understand what was going on with my tracker. I hope it can do the same for someone else because being stuck in postback confusion was really messing me up. Since that fog lifted I've been able to put the pedal to the metal.

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Tracking is not hard to understand, most of the time, people just overcomplicate things

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Most of the time you CAN use s1 - it's just that traditionally, some networks only allow s1 to be used for static values, not dynamic ones like clickid/hitid. So, many affiliates just try to avoid using s1 "just to be safe".

The main thing to note is that you don't HAVE to use s2 - you can use s3 or s4 or s5 etc. to tracker clickid/hitid. But MAKE SURE that you're using the SAME token in your offer link and postback link. It's kind of synonymous to having a dresser with several drawers - you can use any drawer to store the clickid/hitid, but make sure you're retrieving the value from the same drawer you've saved it to.




Amy

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Nice drawing up there (I will have to start refer to it for other newbies).

Good to hear that it clicked and you understand tracking now!

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Thank you SO much for this. I read through the guide a couple times and kinda got it, but struggled with the application. This was really helpful and cemented what I thought was going on

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This is the best explanation I've ever seen!

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You're a legend brother this helped me out heaaaaaaapss

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