Why do you need a tracker? And how do you still live without one?

Everything that I'm going to explain below was described a hundred times in trackers' manuals and forums. But its description is often dry and focused on functionality rather than profit and real-life application. In contrast, I will use simple situations you face, if not every day then certainly every week. That's it, no more empty talk!

Point One: Proper Analytics in Ten Minutes a Day!

The keyword here is "proper"! If you're a newbie and you're working with one affiliate, there's one thing you still don't know. As soon as you connect a couple more affiliates and start using more traffic sources, you'll have a couple of dozens of tabs with stats constantly open in your browser. I'm not kidding! I've worked that way, and it was rubbish. No, not because you have to switch between tabs (although that too, and they're even different in design!). The problem is that affiliates provide slightly different data, and you're going to be sick of harmonizing them. And then there are a bunch of platforms that delay statistics provision for, say, an hour or two. Or they don't provide it at all. As a result, you'll argue with support and harmonize the data in Excel tabs. In short, you'll do someone else's job. 

But, all you have to do is set up the postback parameters you need (customized or standard ones) in your tracker. That's it, you have one page where you get the stats you need. 


But there is a problem I encountered in this area. And even the tracker doesn't solve it. The problem is that it's impossible to calculate costs for social media conversions (the sources themselves do not provide tokens). But at least we get revenue data and can track the dynamics by day and conversion rate. By the way, you can set up postbacks to get Telegram warnings of the conversion rate drop. However, it isn’t easy to set up. But if you need it, you can always write to the tracker's technical support.

Point Two: Automatic Affiliate Change after Reaching the Limit

It's a common situation when there's a new interesting offer at the affiliate network. You drive traffic easily and nicely, but there's a limit – 120 leads per day. You quickly reach it, so what's next? The answer is simple. You drive the traffic to the same offer of another affiliate. And now imagine that there are ten affiliate programs, and you have to switch between them by hand every day! It's not just one offer but sometimes dozens. So, your job is like the work of a locksmith, who from 8 am to 5 pm tightens the same nut.

For this reason, you simply set two offers in your tracker. You call them smth like JustWhatILove[One] and JustWhatILove[Two]. Then you set the limit coinciding with the affiliate limit (120 leads) and redirect the rest to the second affiliate. Guess what happens when the leads are delivered!
             

Point Three: Make the Most of Traffic Using TDS

It should be clear to you by now, but I'll explain in simple terms for those who have been living under a rock for the last ten years. TDS is a traffic distribution system.

Suppose you have three million potential clicks from a website per day. The audience is diverse: desktops, mobiles, iOS, Android OS, Russia, Ukraine, a little bit of Canada. Okay.

Next, you have a good offer, let's call it Offer-1. But Offer-1 only requests iOS iPad users from Canada as they are worth a lot. So, your task is to set up a rule to show Offer-1 to all iPad users from Canada. Then you look at other offers. For example, some need users from Ukraine using the Android 8 OS version and above. Then you set up a rule for them. And using this simple method, you divide all your traffic into categories to bring you maximum profit.


Here's how to create a rule for the desired geo-location. Just choose a country and click *Equal*.


Here's how to select the desired OS. Choose the required and click *Equal*.


It means that if there is an Android OS user from Ukraine, we have the rule to redirect such users to the relevant offers. We repeat the same actions for the other countries and OSs.
 

Point Four: Choosing Key Affiliate by Offer

You gotta hustle webmasters if you wanna survive. I guess that’s how the daily briefings start in the majority of affiliates. And then they promote their high stakes. But when you choose the same offer with two different affiliates, the conversion rate is 5x different! Jokes aside! 5x!

So, comparing their payouts is like comparing Victoria's Secret Angels – they won't sleep with you either way. I'm not saying that affiliates do it on purpose, no. Just some people are more skilled, and some are all thumbs. And it's not the best decision to work with thumbs.
That's why you make three identical offers from three different affiliates and give 33% of your traffic to each of them in the tracker.


You can see on the screenshot how we added offers to the campaign – on the right side of the campaign settings.

Source some traffic using this rule (don't get greedy) and see how much you earn instead of rates the affiliates promoted to you. In clever terms, this is called split-testing. And I suggest you do such testing not only for offers but also pre-landing pages, sources, etc.

Point Six: Cloaking

Of course, you've already heard about it, but I'll remind you. It's a) forbidden (but not a crime) b) complicated c) there's not much information ABOUT, and nobody shares it, because why would somebody give you money? Not all trackers have cloaking, but it exists. And some trackers can even consult you on it personally if you're a valued client. However, the trackers don't like to deal with newbies, so if you want to get a good consultation, first buy a plan with cloaking. But be prepared for that shit not to work out, lol. It hasn't always worked out for me, but when it did, it was worth it.

Let me explain to you the point of cloaking. For example, one of the largest social networks in the world bans crypto ads. But the bitcoin dropped, and new offers arose. Your task is to push the crypto ads to Facebook. It's pretty simple, you have to show one offer to moderators and another one to users. That's what the tracker will help you do. You set the parameters of moderator's fooling, and maybe your ads will slip through.

It's useful not only for Facebook. There are a lot of other ways to use cloaking. But it's up to you to figure it out. You can share your experience afterward.
  

Point Seven: Paranoid One

Affiliates often have their webmasters, so if you've found a good offer source, you've found it for an affiliate. Well, what did you think? That's how people develop the Internet. Lol.

So, the tracker offers you to hide the referer with its domain. To do this, you need to use Metarefresh in your campaign settings. Or Double Meta refresh, to hide from all sorts of spy services as well. It's tricky but possible! You'll find this function when you create a campaign.
However, you can get fraud-filtered. This option can be used as a last resort.

Point Eight: How to Choose Tracker

CIS has no special requirements for a tracker because large traffic sources do not allow to analysis much. I already mentioned above that, for example, in social media, you can hardly extract CPC. It's even more complicated when you source foreign traffic. Six months ago, I would have advised choosing Voluum tracker, but now it has turned into some BS instead of a tracker. It has a bunch of strange modules you are forced to buy (the price is the highest, but they would give a discount if you ask "nicely"). In short, let's forget about the international traffic and talk about the CIS.

I always consider two important tracker characteristics: the speed of redirection and stability. These factors, of course, make Voluum and PeerClick the leaders (the latter is also five times cheaper, lol, that's what we need). 

But! PeerClick is cheap, but only if you have an average budget. While if you're a shark, you need a license and your server (perhaps a server in each geo-location you work with) instead of a cloud tracker. For example, they say Binom is good. In the end, it's quite cheaper (but takes a lot of time to fine-tune), but I do not sweat and use PeerClick. But there are thousands of different trackers. 
 

Summary

I named the KEY tracker functions without which you will earn pennies. You have to study the trackers, communicate with their technical support, learn about new feature updates to keep up to date, so to speak. Or you can keep reading articles for dummies.