Everything about Affiliate Tracking
Webmasters often have to use various widgets, apps, and programs to make it easier to create, place, and track the effectiveness of their ads.
How to get a quick start in affiliate marketing? Which characteristics must a tracking platform have? Let’s take a closer look at these questions.
Today, affiliate marketing appeals to many brand owners because it is one of the most effective ways to get more targeted traffic and increase sales. When entering the affiliate marketing market, you have to keep in mind many nuances: building relationships with affiliates, technical settings, choosing a tracking platform and payment methods. And, for sure, the biggest issue is choosing a tracking platform.
What is a tracker in affiliate marketing?
Let’s understand what ads tracker is and what it is used for. It is a system that detects information on traffic and collects statistics on it, from clicking on the link to getting to the page of the offer.
If you imagine the path of the user, starting from the source of traffic and to the offer, the tracker is in the middle. After the user clicks on an ad (banner, link, video, etc.), ad tracking is performed, and traffic data is recorded in statistics. Based on this data, you can then manage the flow of traffic and fine-tune the targeting. In addition, one of the tracker’s advanced features is the Traffic Distribution System, a real-time traffic distribution system that allows you to distribute traffic according to predefined parameters.
In other words, when the system sees the rules you set, it directs the visitor to the pages you want. So, no matter what kind of traffic you are working with and where you are expanding, ads tracker is an effective and reliable assistant. Nowadays, there are a lot of resources that sell or buy traffic, and it is very convenient when the statistics is collected in one service.
What is an affiliate marketing tracking software platform for?
With the affiliate tracking platform, you can effectively manage your affiliate program and perform the following tasks:
- track the effectiveness of your campaigns with built-in analytics tools;
- manage your offers, creatives and campaigns;
- set up campaigns and run them properly;
- make payments to your partners;
- keep all your campaigns in one place.
Tracker is a tool designed specifically for working with traffic. It is used by webmasters, marketers, advertisers and other specialists in related industries. The functionality of the affiliate tracking platform allows you to significantly reduce the cost of buying ads, because with its help, you can quickly change the bindings for more effective (conversion). Some trackers also help to hide statistics from CPA-networks, create templates for landing pages, etc.
Don’t forget that tracking, regardless of the sphere or market, will never cease to be relevant. That means it just has to keep working, even though, technically, tracking is always one step ahead, that’s its nature.
Varieties of trackers in affiliate marketing.
In addition to differences in price, functionality and promotion, trackers are divided into two types:
- Server;
- Cloud.
Let’s consider the features, advantages and disadvantages of each option.
Server-based
Deployed on arbitrators own servers. Requires serious configuration.
Have the following advantages:
- Fast server response;
- Unlimited traffic;
- All data is kept by the webmaster.
But there are also disadvantages:
- You need to have a server (own or rent one), and understand how to work with the server;
- The server is tied to the place where it is located, so when working with different GEOs, the speed of response of the software can seriously slacken.
To work with that kind of affiliate marketing tracker, you need to buy a license. Due to being tied to a data center, if you work with different GEO, you will have to buy many licenses and deploy trackers on servers in different countries.
Cloud-based
These are online services where all data is stored in the cloud, and the arbitrator does not need to install, configure anything, etc. A cloud solution covers any GEO, so there is no problem with the speed of the software.
Advantages of the cloud tracker:
- Auto server selection depending on the GEO;
- High speed of response;
- Quick launch and configuration of the software;
- No need to go into technical details.
The main disadvantage of such a tracker is its high cost (usually the price is included in tariffs, which are limited by the number of actions per month).
Now let’s look at a personal recommendation from iMonetizeIt.
AdsBridge is a tracker with impressive functionality and affordable prices. This tracker uses only the most advanced technology to successfully track, manage and optimize affiliate marketing campaigns.
How does the ad tracking works on AdsBridge?
It’s simple: when you send traffic to an advertising network, website, teaser network or any other traffic source (Google, Facebook or others), the system assigns each click a unique id and passes the traffic along with this parameter on to the offer.
GET parameters are usually used to pass a unique click id to partner program. These are variables used to pass all values to the affiliate program through a link.
This value is always unique for each click-through, it is generated by the tracker itself, and the affiliate program just records it and saves it for itself.
When a successful conversion (purchase, subscription, registration, etc.) occurs, the affiliate network sends the information (postback) back to the AdsBridge tracker by passing on the unique click id.
Thus, AdsBridge understands which click has brought a successful conversion and records all the information about it in its statistics (there are more than 20 parameters, and they are constantly updated, such as geographical location of the user, the device from which the transition was made, the browser language, the operating system and much more). This allows you to fine-tune, analyze the profitability of advertising, get detailed statistics on advertising campaigns and use the tracker functions to monetize traffic more effectively. By setting up filters on the source of traffic, you can cut off unconverted conversions and thus reduce the costs of buying traffic.
Ads tracker AdsBridge is an excellent choice for those who need to monitor the effectiveness of advertising and are too lazy to tweak the whole system for themselves, wasting a lot of time and effort. It’s an intelligent software solution that has everything ready to use. The important advantage is its easy connection to many affiliate networks and all popular traffic sources, for which the system has constantly updated templates.
Affiliate link tracking possibilities
When working with affiliate networks programme or individual affiliate providers directly, tracking links is just as important. Affiliate tracking URLs are tracking links of affiliate providers.
Using multiple affiliate networks or individual affiliate providers, there are difficulties with tracking and performance evaluation. With AdsBridge functionality, you can gather all the data in one place, on one platform, and thus bring everything into one statistics.
You just need to create the offers in your account and use them. You can add offers from different affiliate networks to the same campaign, and thus test them, distribute traffic according to certain rules and conditions.
You can view statistics as a total, to compare items with each other on certain parameters, and for a particular item. It is possible to view the statistics for an individual affiliate network, this will allow determining which offerer from this network brings more conversions.
The main aspect, the AdsBridge tracker performs a/b testing
Why do you need split testing for your site?
AdsBridge functionality allows you to accurately split test elements with each other and determine which landing page and which offerer works best together.
Traffic distribution conditions allow to set up paths in such a way that the most target traffic goes to the desired link and offer.
The effectiveness of all the bundles can be viewed in detailed statistics for a campaign, a rule or an individual route. You can also view the statistics for an individual link tracking or offerer and analyze by which rule, with which condition, and in which bundle it brings more conversions and gives the best performance.
In what business the ad tracking is useful?
Affiliates, webmasters, media buy teams, advertising agencies, ad networks – everyone who works in the CPA field needs a tracker. Without one, it is hard to get precise statistics, set automation and take control over all rates of an advertising campaign.
