Home > Technical & Creative Skills > Tracking Campaigns

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Tracker Domain vs. Custom Domain (9)

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Hey guys

About tracking domains, again I use bemob but this doesn't necessarily apply only to bemob.

Trackers are usually suggesting to setup a custom tracking domain, and that's no problem at all.

However, these trackers request the custom domain to be forwarded using CNAME, which, according to sources like Kintura, can significantly slow down redirect time in Tier 3 GEO's and so.

Now, this is the answer I got from the Bemob team about custom & default domains:

You need to use your custom domain because we don’t recommend using our default domains.

BeMob default domains are available to all our active users.
You can use them, however note that these domains are shared with all other users.
In this case the risk of campaign being flagged by some traffic sources or third-party services as malicious increases.
This is the main reason we suggest to use default domains for testing purposes only.
When you don't have to share common domains, the traffic in your campaigns is not affected by other users.

Also, it doesn’t matter if you use Namecheap or Godaddy.

Yep. So I think I prefer going with the standard tracker URL to avoid those CNAME redirects, but how big is the risk of the tracker domain being flagged? And even if its flagged, is it relevant to push or so?

Because, I imagine this is not exactly the same as Landing page flag. Users can still be able to click through if the traffic source allows to place that URL? (I understand this may be different in places like Facebook, where they can ban that URL even for sending in chat boxes - I think they already did, lol).

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Don't use the custom (sub)domains the tracker's give you, its just not worth it at all.

They will get flagged or be flagged already, causing immediate issues for your campaigns at the user-level and potentially getting your ad account banned if its Facebook that you're trying to run on.

Using custom tracking domains is a status quo, not really a dilemma at this stage, basically you need SSL + custom domains and the ability to change custom domains whenever you want, otherwise you're shooting yourself in the foot.

Also, CNAMEs are not redirects. DNS resolution happens before a browser loads anything, and while resolution of the end destination of a CNAME record may be slower than an A-record (which points to an IP), this is not always a limiting factor -- often network latency will be since many systems between users and servers will cache DNS responses but they cannot cache your tracking responses.

TL;DR, definitely use custom domains with your tracker, with whatever approach they provide (usually CNAMEs only, but sometimes an A-record approach).

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Really man, when a LP domain gets flagged it´s no big deal at all.

But when the tracking domain gets flagged it will be very annoying.

Then you would have to change all links in all of your campaigns in all trafficsources.

Now imagine you have hundreds of campaigns running...

And I can tell that stuff from my own experience.

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Actually, there's a huge difference between what trackers provide as a default "tracker" domain and I think it's worth pointing out.

It looks like in Bemob, the so called default domains are shared by all users. I (& I think everyone agrees with me here) advise against using them because you're not in control of where they are being used and who else is using them. You do not want to end up with a flagged domain, a banned campaign or broken tracking links especially if you're less experienced in tracking and take longer to make it work. I think some other trackers are also providing shared domains for their users. As Bemob said - they're good for testing. But in reality, they are being used as main tracking domains which complicates things.

In Voluum, we used to have them too - they were called legacy domains. We don't anymore. Now, our users are assigned dedicated domains. The difference between Voluum's dedicated domains and default domains available in other trackers is that a dedicated domain is used only by you.​ We create it the moment you register in Voluum and assign it specifically to your account, no one else has access to it. It's a safer option and still, I recommend getting a custom domain. The lag you're worried about is so insignificant compared to other factors playing a role in your redirect speed, I wouldn't worry about it. If you're interested in learning more about it though, here's an article to read.
And another, this one on a redirect speed test.


Karolina

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@Voluum, when can you tell your dedicated domain is flagged?

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You can check it for example HERE, HERE and HERE

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@twinaxe thanks for the sites to check.

Just have seen that I am blacklisted at McAfee. It is green on Google though.

Is McAfee blacklisting a problem if I target Android Mobile devices?

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@larsometer

It depends for what you consider it as a problem.

One thing is to check for the trafficsources side, another thing is to check for the big red warning screen.

For the warning screen you only need to make sure to don´t be flagged by Google Safe Browsing.

Trafficsources sometimes reject campaigns already when you are flagged by one AV service or so.

When you get your campaign running then it shouldn´t be a problem for mobile campaigns when your domain is flagged by McAfee.

I even had many desktops running where my domains always got flagged by Kaspersky and I couldn´t do anything about it.

As soon as I had a new campaign it got flagged again after an hour or so.

Then I just didn´t care about it and ran my campaigns and didn´t see a big disadvantage there.

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As long as you stay profitable... but really, some AV tools are not really widely used, so being flagged by such services isn't going to have a big impact on your campaigns. Of course, it's the best when your domains do not "carry" any flags.

I just did some search and looks like McAfee has a market share of 7-25%, based on the source and OS... not everyone has an AV installed so the final % of affected users would be even lower, but yes, it is a small problem to be flagged by it.

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