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How to setup postback when you use multiple trackers? (30)

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Hey guys, I am back after a long time

Anyway I am planning to test three different trackers - Voluum/Binom/Thrive
So a problem that I face is the postback, because when I talked to affiliate networks that use Cake, they said they can only add one postback url, while I want three (one for each tracker).

I am yet to ask other networks - some uses custom backend and others use everflow/hasoffers .etc

Any cool trick to fire conversion to three postback urls from one affiliate network?

Thanks!

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If you want to mirror all your stats, then you could just redirect it through each tracker but it will get messy and you will slow down your camps.

Or you could daisy chain the postback only using each tracker as a traffic source?

Takes a bit of planning to work out, but basically, setup the initial camp on the 1st tracker, but have the second tracker be the traffic source, which posts back to the second tracker, which posts back to the third tracker as its traffic source.

I have not done this and this is not financial advice. I will not be held responsible if this breaks your camps or makes you a shot ton of more money on accident

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This is smart! Haha.
Let me think through it, then update. It will be a quick solution.

Another solution is to setup a small API to get postback and divert it to different postbacks based on conditions. Will need some scripting though.

Both solutions can break lol. Will update asap

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Let's take a step back, what are you wanting to test?

While @jaybot's solution may get the conversion to all three trackers, it probably won't be very effective in testing. You are making the trackers dependent upon each other and depending upon which variable you wish to test, the first tracker to see the traffic or the conversion will act upon the variable and probably set how the other two interpret the data.

If you are wanting to test the behavior of the trackers on some variable, having them dependent upon each other is probably not the right solution. Instead, an A/B test is a much better route. You will either need to run multiple campaigns within a traffic source or utilize any A/B testing it supports.

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Actually Thrive used to have an option for this, where you basically could add optional postbacks on the tracker postback settings, this way it would pass the click ids to all related trackers.

It practically receives the click ids on the main Thrive postback URL and posts them to all additional postbacks. Obviously the conversion will be attributed to the tracker where the click id was generated, so it doesn’t have any risks of attributing conversions by mistake to more than one tracker. Just be careful with the click id mapping on the postbacks.

I don’t have an active thrive installation to verify and share with you an exact example on how to do it. If its still there, there’s no need for any custom API.

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@platinum

Thanks bro, this is the quickest solution. I think I am gonna use it, its called piggybacking.

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I was able to figure a good solution out of your idea, didnt need to chain though. I just need to make a custom traffic source with two tokens - clickid, payout. Then make a campaign, with direct links to all tracker postbacks. Use token data for each tracker postback.

But @platinum has an even more easier solution since I do have Thrive Tracker. Its an inbuilt feature.

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Glad to see its still present there, I wasn't remembering the correct name. Just make sure to use Thrive's postback on all networks, once you've added other postbacks and you should be all set.

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@iwanttofly True. The chaining can make A/B test not work well. I think setting up the postback as a campaign and direct linking to different trackers will serve a better A/B test purpose.

I am using it for A/B testing yes. Also I need to see if my backend software works well with all trackers, for that purpose any method should do.

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What are you trying to find out with such a test though? In order to also record the traffic volumes at all 3 trackers, you need to somehow run the traffic through all of them at once (in a chain) which will require several redirects and that will slow the campaigns down for sure. Recording something like LP ctr with all 3 at once would be even more complicated. Have you figured out a way on how to do this?

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If Thrive is not an option, here are 2 more:

- DataFire: https://app.datafire.io/

It will host an endpoint you can call, and then you build the workflow to call each of the 3 URL in parallel, without relying on one tracker calling the others
It is similar to Zapier, but way cheaper.

- ask some Python dev guy to write the code for you (receiving + checking the parameters + calling each of the 3 URL). It is not complicated. Then you can host it on AWS lambda + API gateway, and it will cost you around 5$ / million calls

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Hmm I haven't done this with so much detail. Just running a campaign with same banner with 3 different links for each tracker to do a split test. The conversion will go to Thrive first, then it will get piggybacked to Voluum and Binom. I will try to publish results once I start and complete the test.

It will also help my developers to include Voluum and Binom support for some automation software we use for our campaign.

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Thanks man, these are great solutions too. Datafire and lambda + API sounds great, especially to make something custom out of it. I can't believe this problem could be solved in 4 different ways already lol (Thrive Piggyback, Datafire, API and using Campaigns for Postback) while a few days ago I was stuck.

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I'm still missing the motive Why are you doing this? Do you think there will be more conversions with one tracker vs another, or whats the point?

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Yeah I don't quite see the point of this? You're just going to hurt your own campaign performance by redirecting so many times.

If you want to test tracker vs tracker you should have 3 separate banners (duplicates) that each use their own link so that they go through tracking systems independently of each other.

Setting up the postback at the end is not hard as you can just configure offers in each tracker to pass their click ID and some other param like &s5=Voluum. Then set a postback to go to something like Integromat, Datafire, whatever and capture all data. If "Voluum" passed then use X postback URL. If "thrive" passed use another.

If the goal is split-testing, I think you've got the wrong approach in mind here. The tracking should be in parallel, not sequential, and the postbacks from the network at the end can be routed to the right tracker as needed

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Yeah kinda. I wanted to switch out of Thrive as I faced some issues (Frozen offer/lander page, a few outages in last year). Just want to decide between Binom and Voluum. I also want the API to be fast, Thrive has a fast API but Binom is slow, this will reduce the frequency at which I can collect data. I am hoping Voluum will be a bit more faster.

Also I moved out of Liquidweb recently, and fully switched to AWS. I had a $110 AWS dedicated cloud hosting, and it ended up crashing all the time when I scale, costed me couple thousand dollars each time it happened. I didn't even know what was crashing - Thrive or Liquidweb until I set up downtime alerts in Pingdom (Just $15 a month, awesome service lol). Apparently apache servers have a limit of concurrent connections called scoreboard, and they limited mine at 150 which was crossed and the whole server crashed. They increased it to 250 for me, and then they suggested me to get a bigger $200 hosting lol. But AWS S3 has a concurrent limit over 3000, at a fraction of the price. So I switched and its working great so far.

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I am doing parallel, not sequential. My initial doubt was how to make postback happen properly and I found a few solutions here like you mentioned.

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I still dont think you will find anything out with such a test, since one of the trackers has to be the primary one, so if that one limits something, all the other trackers will be affected.

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What do you mean one tracker is primary? A little confused lol.
Only postback goes to one tracker, and it comes from the affiliate network. The whole user flow except postback happens through a single tracker each (Duplicate Ads - 1 Ad per Tracker). My VA is preparing the campaigns lol, I need to stop him if this is a bad idea haha.

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If you're doing it in parallel with duplicates of each ad, with one going to each tracker, then this is very doable, arguably even straightforward.

I would just modify your offer in each tracker to pass ...&s5=tracker_name, for example.

Then use something like Integromat > create scenario where it receives a webhook > some conditional routing for Thrive > this way, Voluum > that way, etc. and have them fire different GET requests.

Hell, you could even fire a postback to all of them and let them drop the invalid IDs lol. You'd be hitting the tracker with many conversion events that are invalid, but they are probably going to receive, check the click ID > know its invalid > stop processing. So you don't even need conditional routing for this, you could just hit all systems with the same data and let them figure it out.

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I'm still not sure what you are testing then. If the ads are tied to one tracker, then all you are testing is that tracker. Everything else is dependent upon that tracker and its behavior.

To see how the trackers behave, you're going to have to A/B test somehow. I see only two real solutions, another app is tied to the ad(s) and distributes the traffic between trackers. You're now introducing another step in the flow AND all tracker behavior is influenced by this additional app.

OR

You use the traffic source to divide traffic between ads tied to the individual trackers. An A/B test. There is still the issue as to whether the traffic source does a good job of dividing up traffic, but with a large enough sample size you should hopefully be able to see the data you are after.

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So the traffic goes through one tracker and that one tracker is the only one that has some influence on the performance of the campaign. If that tracker is slow, the campaign will be slow too. The other trackers are just getting conversion postback from the affiliate networks, so whatever the affiliate networks fires, will be recorded by the other trackers. So the only thing that you will test this, is whether the other trackers can register the conversions sent to them from the first/primary tracker... click data, LP ctr and all the other data will remain just in the tracker that the actual click flow through.

I really don't understand what such a test is good for I might be missing something for sure, but this doesnt make any sense to me

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Yup, this is exactly what I am doing. Didn't start the test yet, my VA is a little slow as he is learning the new trackers. Will run by Thursday. I am just curious before switching trackers, I think performance wont change much.

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Does Zeno's explanation makes sense?

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This is what zeno said:

So what he says, I believe, is that you will be running identical one AD in 3 separate campaigns, each of them linking to a different tracker.

Are you planning to do it like this?

So 3 copies of the same AD (A,B and C), each ad as a separate campaign on the same traffic source (campaigns A,B and C). Banner A from campaign A linking to Voluum, banner B in campaign B linking to thrive ... etc? So basically, 3 different campaigns where one links to Voluum, one to thrive ... If this is your setup, then yes, you will be able to compare the performance to some extent. But you need to let each campaign run for a pretty long time in order to make sure that all campaigns received comparable quality traffic, since each clicks aren't equal.

But from your description, I wouldn't say this is the setup you are after, or am I wrong?

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As far as I remember CPV Lab also had an option for nested postbacks so that you could pass postback data through to other trackers.

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Yes, this is what I am after lol.
I reread what I wrote and it does sound confusing. Somehow recently my skill in explaining things properly reduced lol. Perhaps its all the lockdown and not talking to people much recently haha.

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It's easy to misread something or to get the idea in a bit different way, don't worry about it

But yeah, I also think that the lockdowns are not doing any good to my brain capacity LOL

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Lol btw do you think this year AWE is happening? I have the last years ticket lol.
I want to attend all the events AWE, TES, ASW everything lol, just need to get the visas and flight tickets.

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I'm watching the covid news like a hawk, but looking at the speed of vaccination, I doubt the limitations on traveling will be lifted soon enough for AWE to happen. But I'm keeping my hopes high for AWA, that sounds way more realistic

I'm missing the buzz too, hopefully we can soon get back to normal and conferences will resume.

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