Campaign/ Tracking URL

Some traffic sources or PPV networks provide you additional metadata through macro so you can track on cpv lab. For example, PropelMedia.com has a set of macros that you can add to the target URL and start tracking more info of the traffics. Pro Tips: In PropelMedia.com, you can start out doing keyword targeting and use macro like {fullReferrerlink} and {rootDomainReferrer} to find out what domain the traffics come from. You then can create an new campaign for URL targeting.

However, if you start out using keyword targeting, you may need to pay attention for bad targets that considered to be matched. Keywords can bring up a lot of bad targets. As you it takes forever for a PropelMedia.com rep to blacklist I recommend you use the keywords to help find related domain targets and place those targets in another campaign that is just placements and not keywords.

CPV Lab – Offer URL

When you insert your offer link into your CPV Lab, you are supposed to leave subid field blank as below. And each CPA network has its own subid field for you to pass them the information. The example below you can see s1 is the token for both Peerfly and OfferLink networks. In general, any network uses Cake platform uses s1, s2, s3, s4.

In your campaign, check the box “Append SubId to” for both Landing Page and Offer. This way CPV Lab can assign unique Id at the end of offer link if you don’t use macro in the offer url. So when someone clicks on the CPV Lab campaign/ tracking link, it redirects users to the offer page with the assigned unique id. Example:

This unique Id, sometimes called “clickID”, is used by CPV Lab to link conversion on offer page to the click. So, you can then tell the performance of the source/ target without passing the keyword and source info to the cpv network. As a rule of thumb, don’t ever let your cpa networks know about where and how you get the traffics that convert so well.

How CPA network notify you what click that leads to the conversion?

In order for the CPA network to notify you that conversion has happened, you need to give them either the Postback URL or image pixel as below. You can tell both of them has the same URL. Normally, when user is taken an action on the offer page that credit as conversion to you, either the ping you back thru Postback URL or the thank you page will be loaded with your image pixel on it. Either way, the same url will be triggered from the cpa network.

Here is the trick – The URL above doesn’t include a way to report back the clickID explicitly. It only works if your offer url uses “subid=” to carry the clickID and the image pixel that pings back your tracking server has the referral url carrying this info back. Otherwise, you will not see the conversion. That is to say, our offer url example above that uses “s1=” to carry the subid, you will never see the conversion in your tracking system. For safety, you can do the following:

This way, any url pinged back will always carry the subid=clickID info. Lets say the cpa network is using Cake (A4D, WSM, CPATrend, …) then the conversion tracking link is going to be this;

#s1# is the token for subid1 in cake platform. Remember at the top of this post, we use s1 for cpvlab to add unique IDs. If you are using s2 in your OFFER link then, your conversion tracking link should be this;

In this way, cpa network take a look at conversion link and try to find any token that is provided by the system. In this case, system sees #s1# and replace it with the clickID xyz_123_abc at the end, conversion tracking link will be like this just before it is called/loaded;

Sometimes if a cpa network doesn’t provide you a mechanism to automatically pingback the clickID. You may need to pull their subid conversion report and load it manually to your tracking system.

What do we do in practice

If your cpa network allows you to pass s1, s2, s3…, you can use s1 for source id and s2 for clickID. This way, you can allow cpa network to give you feedback about what s1 is not performing well. Then, you can then stop the source easily.

Sometimes you may have different payouts in different cases like sign up in different offers or different age group pays differently, you cpa network may provide you a way to report back the amount thru their macro. For example:

for this example, &revenue is the parameter we use. You will need to setup this in your CPVLab. Go to Settings > Affiliate Networks and make necessary changes. We use &revenue parameter for all of the cpa networks.

CPA network Offer URL cheatsheet