Setting Up Postbacks (from Your Affiliate Networks to Your Traffic Sources)

Setting Up Postbacks (from Your Affiliate Networks to Your Traffic Sources)

Quick Background Information

Click/Postback Flow Infograph

<--- Supply Side                                                                                                         Demand Side --->

There are two sides to the online advertising business, the supply side (companies who sell traffic) and the demand side (companies who buy traffic).  Track Revenue allows you to manage both of these relationships while tracking all of the data that passes between the two sides.

Above is an infographic demonstrating how our tracking works.  Traffic in the form of clicks comes through your Traffic Source (through some ad banner on a webpage), goes through Track Revenue (through the Campaign URL) and to your Affiliate Network (through the Offer URL).  As this happens, pieces of information stored in what we call "tokens" are passed along embedded in the urls.  These tokens live at the end of each of your links after the "?".  

Tokens

You remember Algebra from your old Elementary School days?  Tokens are just like variables (like x and y) that can be used to pass any kind of information.  To demonstrate how the Click/Postback Flow works above, i'll use one token for simplicity that is passed from your Traffic Source, through Track Revenue, to your Affiliate Network, and back.  

And since, we are only using one token to demonstrate, why not use the King of all tokens!  The most essential and yet often renamed -- the SubID (also commonly referred to as ClickID and PubID).  The SubID is just a string of letters and numbers jumbled together that uniquely names a click.  It's sort of like a credit card number.  In our infograph above, the Traffic Source passes their SubID (what they call the clickid) into c2 which is the token that Track Revenue uses to hold the SubID.  Track Revenue then passes the SubID in the token c2 to the Affiliate Network who stores it in their token pbid.  

SO WHAT DO I DO NOW?!

Being the brilliant online advertiser you are, I know everything I said above is old news *yawn*.  But humor me as I give you a Step by Step guide of exactly what you need to do to set up your postback from your affiliate networks to your traffic sources that you can follow to get your Track Revenue account running smoothly -- no thinking involved.

Step by Step Guide: Setting Up Postbacks from Your Affiliate Networks to your Traffic Sources

1.  Set up your integration with your Affiliate Network

Typically this means you have to do 2 things.  

• Find out how your Affiliate Network names their tokens.  
  • This is so when you bring traffic to your Affiliate Network, you can pass the information they need from you into their tokens.  
  • Once you have this information, you can store this information on the Track Revenue Settings>Affiliate Network page.  For details see our Setting Up Affiliate Networks tutorial.
• Give your Affiliate Network your Track Revenue postback.
  • This is so that your Affiliate Network can pass information back to you to inform you when one of your campaigns has brought them a lead.  If you followed the token lesson above, you'll see that they will pass you the subid of the click you sent them back to you to let you know that click converted.
  • Your postback link can be found on the Help page of Track Revenue. *Look for the "?" on the top right of Track Revenue.  On the Help>Tracking Conversions tab, you'll see your postback link.  It'll look a little something like this:

http://YourTrackingDomain.com/track?subid=SUBID_TOKEN_PASSED_TO_AFF_NETWORK

2.  Create Offers and Create Campaigns to Bring Traffic to your Offers

Once you create an Offer in Track Revenue, you can create a Campaign to send traffic to that Offer. Because you give your Campaign link to your Traffic Source to bring traffic to your Affiliate Network's Offer, this is the connecting piece between your Affiliate Network postback setup and your Traffic Source postback setup. 

For details on how to create Offers and Campaigns, see the following tutorials:

• Setting Up Offers
• Setting Up Campaigns

3.  Give your Campaign Link to a Traffic Source

Once you have created Campaigns to run your Offers, you can give the Campaign link Track Revenue generates for you when you create a campaign to your Traffic Source to bring in Traffic.  

Additional Note:

Similar to how your Affiliate Network needed you to pass them certain pieces of information to them through the tokens at the end of the link they provide, you will also need information to be passed to you from your Traffic Source.  At a minimum, you'll need the SubID of a click that the Traffic Source has brought to your campaign.  Details on how to set these tokens are in the Setting Up a Campaign tutorial.

4.  Get your Traffic Source's 3rd Party Postback

In order to inform your Traffic Source when they have brought conversions to your Campaigns, you'll need their postback.  To do this, you'll simply need to contact your Traffic Source and ask them to provide their postback link.  

Once you've set up a Traffic Source in your Track Revenue account with their postback link and selected a Traffic Source for a campaign, when your Traffic Source brings in a click that results in a conversion, we'll automatically fire their postback link to inform them.

You Did It!! 

I hope you enjoyed our guide on Setting Up Postbacks from Your Affiliate Networks to Your Traffic Sources!