Matt Marcin - Incentive Marketing

Importance of Tracking Incentive Sites

Let’s face it, you can’t give users free stuff without making sure they did their end of the deal by completing some offers! When setting up an incentive site, it’s very very important to get some really solid tracking or you are going to get many complaints from users and lose a ton of cash.

We want to track every single offer and the user that completed it. Depending on the type of site, we often have to do this in real time. There are a few ways to do this and all have varying levels of programming skill involved unless you hire someone!

How do we track offers?

The main thing we need to do is track SubIDs. These are a unique identifier that you usually append to the end of an affiliate URL. (ex: http://affiliateoffer.com/231/{SUBID}). Normally you would put the user’s ID number from your database as the SubID for any offer they attempt. This information is saved by your affiliate network so that you can retrieve it and properly credit the user!

Passing the SubID is the easy part… The tough part to manage is getting that data back from the affiliate network. Most networks nowadays have a feature called a Postback. This means that when a lead comes through, the affiliate network is going to automatically access a page on your site that can accept the data. The page the network is accessing is called your Postback URL and is usually different for each affiliate network. (ex: http://myincentsite.com/postback/cpastorm.php?offerid={offerid}&subid={subid}). Essentially they are telling you which offer a specific user did so that you can give them credit!

This process completes the loop and is the most important software that you need to have in place. Without it, you just can’t operate an incentives site. Putting this kind of tracking together is going to require some programming knowledge. If you need help, you can always use elance.com and find someone to work for you.