Tracker

Tracker is an indispensable tool in digital marketing as a whole and affiliate marketing in particular. Its primary function is to register conversion events (leads, orders, sales, etc.) and track them back to particular ads. This in turn allows marketers to gather conversion statistics and analyze it from different angles using various criteria, building what is known as sales (conversion) funnels.

Adspect is equipped with a lightweight yet efficient tracker built right into the core of the system. The Reporting section of the clients area allows you to explore funnels built with different groupings and filters. Among others, it calculates and displays such important metrics as conversions, cost, revenue, CR (conversion rate), ROI (return of investment), CPA (cost per action), and EPC (earn per click) / EPM (earn per thousand clicks.) These are especially useful combined with subaccounting by source identifiers as described in the previous chapter in the paragraph on Sub ID.

Postback

In order to use tracking you need to configure postback of conversion events to our postback URL located in your profile. The postback URL takes three parameters:

  1. aid – Adspect account ID, which is pre-filled and normally will not change;

  2. cid – unique click ID that identifies particular click that made a conversion;

  3. sum (optional) – payout sum of the conversion in case of CPA or revenue share tracking.

Most affiliate programs and networks support postback and provide various macros that can be used to fill variable portions of the URL (cid and sum parameters.) If you need to fire postback manually, then you could place a conversion pixel somewhere, e.g. on a “Thank you” page. For example, assuming that click ID is contained in the clickid link parameter:

<script>
(function () {
  const postback = new URL("https://rpc.adspect.net/v1/postback?aid=1eb5991f-a25b-68f4-b171-00162501c2b4");
  const params = new URLSearchParams(location.search);
  postback.searchParams.set("cid", params.get("clickid"));
  fetch(postback.href, {mode: "no-cors"});
})();
</script>

This code will send a postback request immediately when the page is loaded. For a successfully registered conversion, the postback URL will return the HTTP status code 200 and OK in plain text.

Click IDs

For a conversion to be registered and processed it is required that Adspect has a record of the corresponding click in its statistics database as determined by its click ID. You may either use externally generated click IDs passed to Adspect from outside in a link parameter, in which case you should put the name of that parameter into the Click ID stream setting, or omit the Click ID stream setting and let Adspect generate click IDs automatically. Conversions with click IDs not previously registered by Adspect will be discarded.