How To Use Traffic Tokens To Improve Conversions?

Using traffic tokens to analyze and improve conversions is easier than you think. Are you curious to find out which campaign is bringing you paying customers most effectively? 

Conversion monitoring may seem like one of the most complicated aspects of affiliate marketing. If you’re a beginner affiliate, you may have a couple of questions and concerns. 

What are tokens and postbacks? Do I have to use them when I’m only starting out? What are they for?

If you wish to learn more about conversion monitoring in affiliate marketing, keep reading. In this article, you will find out how tracking is working and what to do to ensure the data’s full accuracy is passed on.

Why is it essential to monitor ads?

The purpose of monitoring your advertising is simply to figure out what works and what doesn’t. 

By using affiliate tracking software, for example, you can make sure that all traffic changes and patterns are logged and measured. If this data is collected, campaign optimization becomes easy.

Tracking is essential if you want to see a good ROI

Traffic sources have a lot of visitors to bring. Although conversions can be made without monitoring the traffic sources, there is no way to optimize profits if you don’t know everything about your traffic. 

Running affiliate marketing campaigns can get complicated pretty quickly – testing more creatives, more deals, more landing pages, and more variables that all need to be checked, monitored, and measured to identify the winners. 

In other words, you need to monitor your advertising campaigns fully to test how successful they are.

How it all works?

The thing that makes affiliate marketing complicated is that there are usually three separate networks you need to transfer information on:

1. The traffic source
2. Your tracker
3. The affiliate network

If we owned all three of them, monitoring would be a breeze since the same device could track the buyer’s entire journey.

In the affiliate marketing ecosystem, details are passed in the following manner:

• The traffic source shows an advertisement and has to pass details about what ad the user has clicked on to your tracker. An externalID is allocated to them (this is called traffic source clickID).
• When users click on your ad, they will be redirected to your campaign tracking connection, and a clickID will be assigned to your tracker.
• This clickID is passed to the affiliate network and then, for the sake of this example, let’s assume the conversion has been made.
• The affiliate network will then need to pass the clickID obtained from your tracker back so that it knows what the user has converted.
• Finally, the tracker has to move the externalID back to the traffic source so that they know the user has converted.

Since the traffic source had the first contact with the user, they need to get back their externalID instead of the clickID created by your tracker. Now, how does it all boil down to tokens and postbacks?

What are traffic tokens?

So, a traffic token is a dynamic variable (placeholder) that allows data to be transferred between the tracker, the traffic source, and the affiliate network.

Each token represents one type of information and records the data for every visit separately.

Traffic tokens are parameters that can be found in the majority of affiliate URLs. They start and end with at least one symbol and differ a lot depending on who you work with, but the typical symbols are: { and }, [and], # and #. They’re always starting with a “?” and even though they seem like a string of random numbers and letters, they’re passing on a lot of valuable details. 

Traffic tokens are connected to your destination URL (which must first be collected from the tracking platform) and combined with the name of the tracking solution parameter. 

Most of the time, traffic sources are integrated with monitoring platforms, making setting the destination URL an easy one-click process.

Coupled with advanced features provided by various currently available affiliate marketing ad trackers, you will have access to highly insightful data that will make performance optimization easy and simple.

What are dynamic tracking tokens?

You don’t have to supply the same clickID to the affiliate network with any user who clicks on your call to action.

If you had to do this manually for every customer, you would be adding clickIDs all day long.

Instead of specifying a single value, why not use dynamic tracking tokens?

Each affiliate network, traffic source, and tracker should have a list of the tokens they use. If you can’t find it, contact your account manager or help support.

What are postbacks?

We have already covered postbacks in our in-depth previous blog post. However, let’s just mention them briefly to help you better understand their connection to tokens. 

While the destination affiliate URL with special tokens helps to transfer information on a specific visit to the tracker, the postback feature is a response that confirms that a conversion has taken place.

Postbacks are connections linking traffic sources, affiliate networks, and trackers. 

Thanks to postbacks, you can see the data on each of these platforms. You have a postback URL which reports conversions to an affiliate monitoring site, and you have a postback URL that reports them to a traffic source.

Simply put, postbacks are used to alert other sites that a conversion has taken place. 

You can see linear details without a postback, but you won’t know where you’re making money and where you can potentially lose profits.

Traffic sources and ad trackers typically have rules that need to be changed according to what you’re monitoring and the format of the traffic tokens used for each site. 

The typical affiliate URL with a postback should look like:

https://scaleo.io/postback?CID=REPLACE&REPACE=REPLACE

CID and payout parameters have to be replaced by the tokens used on the website where your postback will be pasted.

Typical confusion about postbacks

Interestingly, passing data back to traffic sources is something that affiliates often refrain from doing in the fear that anyone could “steal their campaign.” 

But, why would they fear that?

There are a few explanations. 

Traffic appears to be unpredictable and has almost never been the same for more than a few days. Often your campaign performance can drop, and you may not have a clue why. Traffic spikes are not rare phenomena and will occur regardless of whether or not you want to share your postbacks.

Besides, if you were buying a lot of well-converting traffic for your campaign, and suddenly the traffic drops, it’s most likely because it’s been converting well for other affiliates as well. 

Don’t forget that hundreds of affiliates buy traffic from the same sources you buy from. If these traffic sources convert well, they will bid on them and start acquiring much of the traffic. 

To get the traffic back, you’re going to have to raise your bid.

On the other hand, traffic sources actually use your data to enhance your experience and performance.

Sharing postbacks has no negative effect on your campaign, but they can help you out greatly.

Do you need to share postbacks with your traffic source? 

The short answer is yes. 

Now, let me explain. 

If you want to share postbacks with your traffic source, you can potentially help the product teamwork for the highest possible quality of traffic.

Traffic sources encourage affiliates to share postbacks because they help them gain insight into traffic efficiency. 

Also, if there are under-performing outlets for you, it could be because their output is not what it used to be. If some users want to keep postbacks to themselves, the traffic provider doesn’t have the data needed to avoid those unprofitable placements.

Overall, sending postbacks lets traffic sources keep the consistency of the traffic high and the recommendations accurate. 

Conclusion 

Tracking tokens on affiliate marketing may seem more complicated than it really is, but when you buy traffic and clicks, monitoring your affiliate performance is crucial. If you’re using Scaleo affiliate marketing software and still a little confused about traffic tokens and postbacks, you can refer to our help desk articles or contact our support team to help you find the best way of setting up your ad tracking.

Affiliate monitoring is an integral part of affiliate marketing and should be taken very seriously. Traffic tokens contain information about each visit, and postbacks confirm whether or not the visitor has been converted. It’s as easy as it is. You generally only need to configure things once and then enjoy a comprehensive stats breakdown that will allow you to continuously optimize and tweak your campaign in order to increase ROI.

Last Updated on August 25, 2023