Tracking Basics
When you use the Internet and visit websites, you hear about cookies or sessions. Cookies and sessions are widely used to track the activity of the website visitors who pass through the sales funnel.
However, without understanding the processes behind it, you will not be able to understand the fundamentals of affiliate marketing. This guide will walk you through the tracking basics.
In this article
Who's Involved?
The whole process includes 4 parties, each of them plays an important role. They are:
- an Advertiser that provides a fully structured Offer with description, goals, targeting, links, creatives, payout, and budget;
- a Network that has connections with an affiliate who is willing to run the Offer provided by Advertiser;
- Affiliates who are promoting the Offer;
- a User who entered the advertising funnel and converted on the Offer.
How Does it Work?
Tracking Links
The Affiliates use Tracking Links to send User to Advertiser website. When promoting an Offer, they add the tracking link to the ads. When a user clicks on that ad with correctly configured tracking link:
- Scaleo creates a new session on every user’s click;
- Scaleo requests and stores additional information from the Affiliate;
- Scaleo redirects the User to the Advertiser's landing page.
Conversion Links (Pixels)
Advertisers use the conversion links (postbacks or pixels) to send information about the conversion to the Network. When networks run an Advertiser’s offer, the Advertiser reports conversions by using the network’s conversion link for that offer. When a user converts on that offer and a conversion link is sent to Scaleo, the platform:
- identifies the user's session;
- requests and stores additional information from the Advertiser;
- records a conversion for that user in the session.
You can also request and store other pieces of information from affiliates and advertisers, using various Additional Parameters.