Home > Technical & Creative Skills > Tracking Campaigns

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Multiples landers and groups of offers: recreate Thrive branches in others trackers (37)

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Note from @jeremie: Initial thread about Thrive by @andy_d here:
https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...SE-a-Customer/

The discussion moved on how to recreate Thrive branches in other trackers. So let's split

Here is what @andy_d is looking to achieve




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Man, I wish, I am actually SHOCKED no other platform has jacked the branches feature, or filters module. They're highly useful features..

Unfortunately still using this garbage software that is still causing me headaches cause of these incompetent dev's.

I tried to set things up with binom, Voluum, funnel flux, and whilst they came close, they didn't do what I needed it to do.

FunnelFlux was promising at first, but just had way too many kinks to iron out so I scrapped it.

I might revisit it (Zeno where you at?)

Binom, the branches, I couldn't really implement natively, and neither with Voluum.

Getting told to check out red-track, but I don't see first hand a native way to do the same thing either.

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Dude... if you have an ongoing (checks calendar) three year long thread bashing on a SaaS maybe its not the SaaS's fault

You could have coded your own tracker and got rich in the time its taken you keep posting on here lol.

Unless this is trolling and then epic work

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The Thrive branch feature thingy must be amazing if it’s the biggest reason to keep you glued to it.

What does it do exactly?

I have pages and pages of rules setup in Binom based on regions, connection type, device, OS, browser etc. all the normal shit.

Just curious what the branches are and how they work differently.

That may be the main reason no one else has adopted it yet, nobody knows what the hell it is

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It lets you set up different outbound links on one landing page, or even a whole flow of landing pages like a tree branch...

Its really useful for listicles... so you can have something like:

mytrackingurl.com/adfafsdfdafdsf/9200 > Life Insurance offer
mytrackingurl.com/adfafsdfdafdsf/0987 > Mortgage Refi offer
mytrackingurl.com/adfafsdfdafdsf/7657 > PhotoStick offer
mytrackingurl.com/adfafsdfdafdsf/0117 > 2nd layer advertorial for Reverse Mortage
mytrackingurl.com/adfafsdfdafdsf/2287 > link from 2nd layer Reverse Mortgage advertorial to actual Reverse Mortgage offer
mytrackingurl.com/adfafsdfdafdsf/7882 > Health Insurance offer

Etc.

Really helpful for quizzes too - you can set it up so depending on the quiz answers they get taken to different offers, etc.

I've actually never used any tracker except Thrive (and Maximus I guess) so I don't know how the others compare. I know Maximus does not have it... no idea about Voluum/Funnelflux/etc though.

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Ah, I see Thanks for the explanation.

I can see that being super useful for complex quizzes.

For listicles, Voluum has it's own special setup for multiple offers which works pretty well. Binom isn't too hard to setup with multiple click links, like /click1 /click2 /click3 etc.

But for quizzes, yeah... the only way I van think of for different outbound links depending on the quiz answers would be using custom landers with javascript handling the outbound click links. Thrive sounds way easier in that respect

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This should be doable with Binom as well.
@andy_d Check THIS out.

You can send users to specific offers, landers or paths when you just add &to_offer, &to_lander or &to_path to your click URL.

Let me know if it helps.

If not please explain what exactly you are looking for, I am confident that we can find a solution

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Sadly, it is the SaaS's fault.. as I've mentioned numerous times, I've tried switching to 3-5 different trackers.. even visiting old ones like CPVLab.. sadly, no bueno.

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Correct. It makes managing these type of campaigns actually manageable. All Voluum needs to do is make their listicle style campaigns that don't require a pre-lander, just lander > groups of offers.. not sure why nobody has ever done this.. seems trivial

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Hey, yeah, trust me I've spend days trying to get binom to do what I needed, kept running into roadblocks, I got super close, but then found issues with postbacks not firing properly.. basically makes optimizing difficult / pain in the butt.

The other feature, which binom now has something similar "the magic filters" addon (forgot the exact name), is the filtering module that Thrive has.. I use this quite heavily too (ISP whitelisting for example).

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If you want to just tell what exactly you want to achieve, then we can brainstorm together.
@jeremie is also a very smart dude so maybe he could help there as well.


Really man, it´s so bad to see how long the drama is already going

Do you mean the MagicChecker integration?

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You can replicate the setup you have indicated with @Voluum.

Option 1: chaining standard campaigns
- You create a standard campaign, which gives you /click/1, /click/2 ... /click/9 offer links
- When it goes direct to an offer, you select the offer. When you want to put an extra lander, or add an extra branch, you create a dedicated campaign, and then you create an offer that points to the campaign link. You can use this offer in the first campaign. This actually allows you to chain campaigns and recreate the Thrive branches.

Option 2: 2-level listicle campaign with a hack to bypass the intermediary lander when not needed
- You create a prelander.
- Then a listicle campaign, which gives you /intclick/1, /intclick/2 ... /intclick/3 internal links
- As you pointed out, in a listicle, Voluum asks you to always put a lander, then an offer for each lander. There are options available, when you don't need a lander because you go direct to the offer, you can either:
+ link to an empty lander that automatically refresh and load the offer. That adds a redirect but if it is on the same domain, it won't delay the user that much.
+ use Voluum JS direct pixel function to trigger the /intclick/x dynamically, get the final offer link and load it. I have not yet check how the JS direct tracking pixel behave in a listicle and what data they expose, but it's on my task list for the next 2 weeks as i have a serie of sites that could benefit from it.

Option 3: for websites with organic traffic, or unstructured flows where the user can browse several pages before leaving to an offer
- You create a single campaign with /click/1, /click/2 ... /click/9 offer links (up to 50 offers in Voluum)
- You add some JS in your page, so that it collects the campaignID when the user arrives from a paid source (or you use a default one for organic traffic).
- You store it in a cookie or/and in the localstorage of the browser. This allows you a more complex flow.
- When the user leaves the site through a /click/x link, you fetch back the campaign ID from the cookie, and pass it back to Voluum so that that the potential conversion is attributed to the proper traffic source.

The option 1 is more simple to implement, and allows several levels of campaigns chaining, but it is more difficult to reconcile the traffic source cost (registered in the "entrance" campaign) with the affiliate network conversions profits (registered in the exit campaign). This can be done automatically, but it will require you to fetch the data with Voluum API and create a custom report with an algo that follows the chains between campaign.

The option 2 is probably the best one for the setup you described, if limited to two levels (prelander / lander / offer), as it gives more readable stats inside Voluum.

The option 3 is easier to structure complex flows, while still allowing to optimize traffic source placements vs conversions. But you loose the internal flows and conversion rates, which requires additional tools to monitor these metrics such as Google Analytics. This is my favorite so far for non standard flows and organic traffic, as it is still possible to use softwares who optimize in real time at campaign level. The internal conversion rate being a metric that not necesarily needs to be checked in real time if you have (pre)landers somehow optimized.


Otherwise, maybe Laurent from AnyTrack ( @laurentjm ) could offer his perspective. AnyTrack has a totally different approach centered on users sessions, which in theory allows more complex flows without loosing time to construct them in the tracker.

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Yeah, MagicChecker which is similar to Thrive's filtering addon.

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Thanks man, very helpful, indeed, one of the roadblocks I ran into both with binom and voluum was the end result was usually messy reporting, or pixels not firing off properly. And I found support to be a bit unhelpful at times so I struggled to find good solutions and gave up.

Idea 2 could potentially work.. i'll give that one a go with a simple header redirect

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When I need more complicated set ups with clean stats I also create an offer that links to a new campaign and it works good in Binom.

Another thing I do is to create rules for specific situations where I redirect users to specific paths based on the rules.

For example recently I had a campaign where sent the users first to the normal LP, when they clicked the CTA the redirect happened in a new tab and the original tab got refreshed.

For the redirect I put the campaign URL as an offer and made a rule "IF user is NOT UNIQUE" and sent the user to that path then.

What I also like to do and what´s a great feature of Binom is to create rules based on the URL content.

You can either check the whole URL or only the GET part for values and create rules then.



Then you can create a rule like "IF URL contains whatever_you_want" and set a specific path for it.

When you want a user to go to that path just add "whatever_you_want" to the campaign URL.

You can do it for as many different rules/paths as you want to, this way you can also create pretty complicated and dynamic flows while you still have the stats all in one campaign.

For such stuff you can use rules as well, "IF URL contains no_lp" and then send the user direct to the offer.

I hope you get what I mean, if not just let me know.

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Hi @andy_d!

It seems like you had a real struggle there in the last years.

Let me try to explain how can you solve that "branching" situation in CPV Lab Pro.

There are 6 types of predefined campaigns in CPV Lab, and 2 of them can be used in this case.


We track such a setup by using the option to have groups of offers and link to specific group (offers will rotate inside each group):
- you have one landing page (offer wall) with unique links to each offer group
- inside each offer group we define the offers which will get rotated automatically based on the percentages defined
- clicks to each of the offers get tracked as well as conversions that occur on each offer (multiple conversions from same visitor are possible)


Then we have Redirect Profiles and Filter Rules based on many metrics when we want to send some visitors to specific pages/offers.


I strongly suggest that you try CPV Lab Pro, it is a self-hosted tracker which will run on your server as this offers greater flexibility and allows more complex campaigns to be setup.

We also help our users by providing them custom code for their complex features in order to get things tracked exactly as they need.


So we would like to have you give CPV Lab Pro a try and our Support Team will assist you in setting things up.

We offer a 30 Days FREE Trial period, so you can test exactly how it will fit your needs.

Cheers,
Radu

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Unfortunately, this is not replying to the question. Have a look at the setup he described. After the offer wall, he has a mix of offers AND 2nd-step landers followed by offers. Can you rotate landers natively amongst offers?

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Hi @jeremie,

Sure, this is possible with a Landing Page Sequence campaign. This allows multiple levels of landing pages, multiple offer groups and you can rotate between landers and offers on each click.


The Landing Page Sequence campaign type offers great flexibility and we can provide assistance in setting up such complex funnels.


Radu

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Thank you,

I took a look at CPV Lab, but one thing that you guys don't have is the filtering capability (in my case, I use it a lot to filter out unwanted traffic).

Additionally, the interface (even though it is updated), still feels very old school (even though I used to be a heavy user of CPV Lab years ago, to the point I even blogged about how to optimize the clunky DB when it got clogged with clicks. Not sure if the backend has improved since then).

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Actually, I think you may have misunderstood the campaign structure

That's a bit more complex then what I need.

It's basically:

Click > Offer Wall > CTA 1 | CTA 2 | CTA 3 ..... | CTA 10 > Offer Group X

where CTA 1 goes to offer group 1, and CTA 2 to offer group 2 etc... (group=niche of offers, such as dog toys).

Regarding Binom, I set everything up once again, but yeah, the current campaign set up I have, I'm finding it problematic for reporting.


Click > Campaign 1 > CTA x > Campaign 2 (which uses Rules, "URL = group") to direct click to a group of offers. All works well, but the postback tracks to the 2nd campaign (exit campaign), whereby the click / cost tracks to the first campaign, which you can imagine, makes running reporting problematic.

Is there a better way to set this up that I haven't considered within Binom?

I feel like I am *very* close to a solution here

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You can setup a new trafficsource in Binom to use for Campaign 2 and use the click ID from Campaign 1 as external ID in Campaign 2.

Use your own Binom postback URL to pass through conversion info to the "trafficsource" = Campaign 1.


Then add Campaign 2 as an offer to Campaign 1, the Campaign URL should look like this



When the user clicks the CTA in Campaign 1 it will resolve the {clickid} token to the real click ID, gets redirected to Campaign 2 and when a conversion happens the original click ID will be passed through to Campaign 1 so that you can see the conversion in Campaign 1 together with all other stats.

Let me know if it helps.

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This is a really interesting solution.

Few questions:

Would this also pass revenue stats?
Would it show which offers converted?
Would it avoid 'double counting' conversions (in campaign 1 & 2)?

Thanks man

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Testing this out, and finding, another issue .. since I need to specify the branch on-click, I pass it as such (which works when I set the offer as a campaign, but fails when I set up as an offer like above).

https://xxxxxx.com/click.php?lp=1&group=vertical1

When it's a campaign - it works, the group variable passes and I can use the URL= rule to determine which offers to display

When I specify it as a link, like above, it fails to work.

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Could you draw a quick tree with the different cases and tell us how many levels you have? That would help to understand the big picture and brainstorm.

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Yes, when you pass them through from campaign 2 -> campaign 1

Then your postback in the "Campaign 2" trafficsource should look like this

Do you mean if it would show in campaign 1 which offers converted in campaign 2 or other way round or something else?

I´m not sure if this would be possible because all conversions that gets passed through to campaign 1 have to happen first in campaign 2 so tzhey will be shown in both campaigns.

Then just add campaign 2 as an offer instead of direct link

But as jeremie said, would be good to get a better overview about what exactly you want to achieve.

As I said before, I am confident that we find a solution but with such complicated set ups it´s good to get as many details as possible.

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Yes, the graph helps a lot. It is more straight forward that I though initially.

Are you concerned about auto-optimizing rotators, or are you fine with a fixed split percentage?

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Thanks for the graphic.

So the flow would be:

1. User clicks to tracker Campaign 1 with 2 landing pages
2. When user clicks CTA he gets redirected to Campaign 2 with 3 paths for 3 different niches
3. Depending on which offer/exit point the user clicked in campaign 1 he gets redirected to the corresponding path in campaign 2
4. The paths in campaign 2 are direct linked with 3 offers each
5. When user converts the postback should go way back to Campaign 1 to see conversion info there



Is this correct so far?

And what about this?

When the affiliate network sends conversion info to campaign 2 then of course you can see there which offer from campaign 2 converted.

So do you want to see in campaign 1 stats which offer from campaign 2 converted?
Or do you want to see in campaign 2 stats which offer/exit point from campaign 1 converted?
Or do you want to see in campaign 1 stats which offer/exit point from campaign 1 converted?

In the end it all should be possible when you just pass the right values through the flow.

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Well,

Regarding conversions,

Ideally I would have all of it in Campaign 1 where I can identify the landing pages converting, traffic source data (placement IDs for example) that convert, and also which offers are performing the best.

My concern is that the revenue will be double counted in the tracker as a whole since it has to postback to 2 campaigns instead of one

- - - Updated - - -

Auto-optimization would be nice, but can come later after I get the basics figured out

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Ok in this case, here is another option:
- standard redirect campaign with offers A to I all loaded on the same level (/click/1 to /click/9).
- you can optimize the lander rotator in the tracker
- offer rotator made in JS, with a fallback to the first offer in each category for non-JS visitors, and passing a ?nojs=1 query string so that you can detect visitors w/o JS enabled. The path_X class allows to modify all links pointing to that path, with the randomly selected offer. The script is designed for 3 groups of 3 offers, but you can modify it to your needs.


If you are running redirectless, this code can still work, but must be executed before you call the tracker pixel, so that the tracker pixel can replace the href based on the corresponding /click/X randomly selected.

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By the way, If you don't mind, I would like to split the topic between the original issue and all the recent discussion that deserves a thread on its own.

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Whilst this solution can / could work, I'm wondering if this can be expanded as the illustration doesn't factor in all of the CTAs / Niches (there's 5-10 that are on/off at certain times).

i.e. 5-10 groups of offers (and it can be more than 3-4 being split tested).

Also what happens if you only have 1-2 offers instead of 3? Is this number dynamic or will it try sending traffic to a invalid offer?

- - - Updated - - -

New thread makes sense

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Here is a version a bit easier to work with for a non tech person.

Steps:
1) add a class with "path_X" for all the links you want to modify, and define href as the fallback offer for all links belonging to this path (for non-JS users as describer earlier)
2) update the paths object in the script adding a line for each path
3) for each path, add in the array between [] the various options. You have to define the corresponding offers in the tracker. If you pause one offer or add one, you need to update the paths object accordingly.
4) the script will loop through the array and randomly select one of the options, with an equal probability for each. For one user, all links belonging to the same path will be assigned the same value to avoid introducing a bias.

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Thank you for this, definitely a viable solution, albeit, not the most elegant given the need to have to implement this functionality outside of the tracker.

Seems a little cumbersome to have to update a piece of code manually if you have greater or less than a certain amount of offers in a group/niche.

Perhaps a tool can be created here to automatically update this file periodically somehow by pinging Binom's API, and iterating which click IDs there are underneath each path.

Binom has a max of 60 or so correct (/click/60) ?

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That's the trade off: no rotation optimization and manual update. But your stats are agregated in one campaign (and without paying twice for the user tracking like when a user go through 2 campaigns in the tracker)

Another option I had in mind is to do it server side, for example with a PHP file gotopath.php?pathid=X, and you store the same kind of info in a JSON array which is available in the same directory. Then the server side script does the redirect. This will be more convenient if you want to have a tool automating the update of the JSON.

I asked @Voluum to have a look at the thread. Let's see it they come up with something.

I don't know Binom max number of offers. @twinaxe will be able to tell you. Voluum has a 50-offer cap per campaign.

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I am not sure if there are any limits at all.

At least I can add few hundred offers to a campaign in Binom.

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We've discussed this a bit in the past @andy_d and I seem to recall there were some other features you wanted/needed, like API access, mobile responsiveness etc. FunnelFlux Pro is a bit behind schedule on such features for a number of reasons -- something I will post about soon in general (just... stuff going on behind the scenes).

That aside, the actual tracking structure here is likely easier to implement in FunnelFlux and FunnelFlux Pro cf. any other tracker since we have a node-based structure and you can visually tie together just about anything. FunnelFlux original would let you use PHP nodes to do just about any custom routing you can think of (more mature in that respect), but FF Pro is ultimately a better product in just about every way (except maybe if you demand API access right now).

Here's a screenshot of a funnel I built for this (below). I would do conditional routing at the very beginning to split users off from the main flow, rather than relying on some filtering module to do it later -- if you have the data, better to make the decision at the earliest possible stage to simplify life and remove those users from downstream data. This funnel looks a little complex, but keep in mind you're building it once to describe quite a large scenario, then would drive all traffic to it rather than making tonnes of campaigns. You could duplicate it later if you wanted a separate funnel with different routing config.



Here, every lander/offer block is actually a group with an internal rotator. It can have one or multiple landers inside of it. Chain together as you see fit.

We have some features in the backlog that will simplify the number of connections/nodes in the funnel but for now you could just manually create a big one -- I mean, its big, but you can zoom in and out so its no harder than building a mindmap.

I assume each lander has its own niche, and there might be 10-20 CTAs on each lander that you want to go to an offer group (not a single offer), so you'd want space to map things out. We do have a feature that would let you connect all 20 actions to a single block, then have action 1 > page 1, action 2 > page 2, etc. but this feature only works if you want each action to go to a single page, not a group that can rotate. You could start with this and change to groups later, but personally I would rather just map it all out at the beginning so I'm confident of what's going on.

For reporting, at the moment you would know all filtered traffic from unfiltered as the grouping would have a rotator in it for unfiltered, and would go directly to some page if filtered. We have a backlog feature to add names for rotators -- when that's added, you could put a rotator at the end of every condition route (even if its just passing 100% onward to one destination), as a form of labelling. We plan to incorporate this natively into condition nodes later (i.e. you can see each route the user goes down as a step in the journey).

For all the landers involved it would be key to use our JS as well, as its helper functions append data to action links. It's flexible JS and you can use it to create robust tracking. If you have more complex things happening on the pages, you can get ID data from our JS manually to inject into links to insure tracking works well (our focus there is no reliance on cookies or referrer, which requires passing of session IDs and such).

Some sample reporting:



Here notice the lander icon is single or double, the latter meaning a group. If there's only one page in the group we just hide it and show the page directly. If there's multiple pages, we group by the group (lol) first.

Anyway, in terms of building such flows I think FunnelFlux definitely has the capability and edge, as long as you're happy to spend time building the actual funnel properly.

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Ok, so I checked the comments and the graph was helpful in understanding @andy_d 's setup better.

CPV Lab Pro comes with 6 types of campaigns which can virtually cover any funnel.

Based on the graph, this is something that can be achieved by using a single Landing Page Sequence campaign which allows multiple levels of landing pages and offer groups (with offers rotating inside each group).

To demonstrate how this is working we did a TEST campaign which you can check on our DEMO environment.
It is the campaign named “Multiple branches setup” (ID=2716) and can be tested by accessing the Campaign URL:

https://demo.cpvlab.pro/base.php?c=2...19aa5f0d5114b7




In this sample campaign we have a first level with 2 initial landing pages that rotate traffic (50%-50%).

Then the second level has 2 offer wall pages that rotate 50%-50%. Each offer wall page has CTA to multiple offer groups.

Then there are 3 offer groups defined with 3 offers each. Offers will rotate inside each offer group. More offers and groups can be easily added.

Conversions will be tracked through the Tracking Pixel or Postback URL added to the network and multiple conversions/upsells from each visitor are supported.

Reports will show the landing pages and offers which convert and performance for each page, level and offer.

It is also possible to define redirect profiles to filter unwanted traffic and send it to a separate page or URL.


The Landing Page Sequence campaign is very flexible and can track complex funnels.

Our Demo setup can be adjusted by adding more pages, offers or offer groups or by removing the initial Landing Page level if needed.

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I used CPV Lab many years myself and as far as I remember you could really set up more complex funnels with it like 2 levels deep with proper tracking for all traffic in one campaign.

I would say it's at least worth to check it out.

They have a free trial so there's nothing to lose for you.

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