Tracking records all impressions, clicks and transactions from users that were brought by one of the Publishers promoting your Offer. It determines the geo location and device of the user and makes sure this information becomes available in the platform. Implementing tracking is a vital first step to start using our platform.

How does tracking work?

After making an Offer available in our marketplace, Publishers can create a click and impression link. Every impression or click made through those links are stored and connected to the Publisher that created the link.

Transactions get recorded either through a pixel on the success page, or through a postback (server-to-server call). The pixel or postback URL contains all information about the Offer and the transaction, but misses the information about the Publisher. So when a transaction is recorded, tracking will try to connect it with an impression or click to find the Publisher. If there are multiple matches, the latest click gets priority.

How tracking is connecting the transaction with the impression or click, depends on the tracking method. We support two different methods: conversion pixel and postback (server-to-server call).

Conversion pixel

This method relies on a cookie that is stored in the end user’s browser and a pixel on the success page (“thank you page”) of the Offer. There are two variations of this tracking method:

1. First party cookie tracking

2. Third party cookie tracking

First party cookie tracking

This tracking method is using cookies that are set for the Advertiser’s domain. To set those cookies the Advertiser has to place a HTML file that handles the cookie placement on his server. When the pixel fires, it reads the cookie value and passes that to our tracking server so we can connect the transaction with the Publisher. This is our recommended tracking method because of its ease of implementation and accuracy.

Third party cookie tracking

This tracking method is using cookies that are set directly on our tracking domain. When the pixel gets fired, we can access the cookies and connect the transactions with a tracking link and so determine the Publisher.

Postback

This method doesn’t rely on cookies or a pixel. Instead, the unique ID of a click is passed to the Advertiser as a parameter in the target URL. The Advertiser has to store this click ID for the user. When the same user makes a transaction, the Advertiser has to do a server-to-server call with the stored click ID to our tracking server. Based on the click ID we can connect the transaction to a tracking link and so determine the Publisher. This method is more difficult to implement and requires more technical knowledge from the Advertiser. In return this method is not affected by ad blocking software and can be implemented outside of the browser, for example in mobile apps.