TUNE knows that no two offers are alike and that, in many situations, you may want to impose stricter limitations for one offer than another. Some differences can include:
- One offer wants to track user sessions for up to 30 days, while another tracks up to 90.
- One offer pays partners a flat, one-time payout; another will have multiple conversion points where the partner can get a commission.
- An advertiser of an offer wants to manually approve each conversion, while another wants to reject any invalid conversions at the end of the billing period.
With the tracking settings available in each offer, you can adjust each offer to better adhere to a campaign or advertiser’s requirements. This article describes each offer-level tracking setting.
Offer Conversion Pixel / Postback URL
This is often considered the most important piece of any offer, as it is used to fire any offer conversions when a user has reached the conversion page and the payout is awarded to the partner. Your offer has an iframe conversion pixel, an image conversion pixel, or a server postback URL.
To access the conversion pixel/postback for your offer, go to the offer page and click Tracking in the Details panel. This takes you to a page where the main offer pixel is located:
With this pixel (or postback if that is set for the offer), you can track conversions for this offer by placing this code on the advertiser’s conversion page.
Offer Goals
If your offer needs to track more than one conversion point in the offer, like a lead-gen form and then the sale of a product, then you can use Offer Goals to set multiple points to track conversions within the same session.
To enable this feature for an offer, go to the Payout panel and click Edit. Then, set “Multiple Conversion Goals” to “Enabled.” You can then give the main offer pixel/postback a name, or (if left blank) the pixel appears as “Default” in the list of goals:
Now, you can add Offer Goals to the offer and set the appropriate payout + revenue for each goal. For more information on this topic, check out our article on offer goals.
Tracking Settings
On the offer’s page, the Tracking panel contains options for several tracking-related settings:
This panel hosts the different tracking settings for the offer. Some of these settings are enabled at the company level and can be enabled or disabled here at the offer level, while others are available on all offers but can also be enabled or disabled. To view all the options, click Edit at the top right of the panel.
Proactive Click Fraud Prevention: When enabled, this setting rejects clicks marked as suspicious by the TUNE fraud database (powered by Fraudlogix). Rejected clicks redirect to a blank page and are not eligible for attribution. Clicks matching known sources of fraud are marked as suspicious even if they are not rejected. The value of this setting is only applied when the Proactive Click Fraud Prevention Platform-wide tracking setting is “Enabled.”
First Click Attribution: When enabled, this setting forwards users from subsequent clicks to the Preview URL and attributes conversions only using First Clicks. The value of this setting is only applied when the First Click Attribution Platform-wide tracking setting is “Enabled.”
For CPC offers with Postback tracking protocol, TUNE determines the First Click by creating a server-side user session that is being checked against on every click.
For all other payout types and tracking protocols, TUNE determines First Click using a session cookie in the user’s browser.
Tracking Domain: This option lets you select what tracking domain you want your partner to track links and offer pixels/postbacks to use. This is applicable if you have a custom tracking domain or multiple tracking domains set up. By default, the offer will use the default tracking domain or the go2cloud.org domain for secure conversion pixels if the offer is tracking conversions on a secure page.
Secure Tracking Link: When enabled, this setting defaults tracking links you or your publishers generate to HTTPS. When disabled, tracking links instead default to using HTTP.
Redirect Offer: If this offer hits a conversion/payout/revenue cap, has passed its expiration date, or is set to “Paused” status, you can select another offer to redirect the user to (and register a click for). If no redirect offer is set and the offer is paused, expired, or hits a cap, the user will go to a blank page.
Secondary Offer: When enabled, this setting redirects users who click through an offer they’ve already converted on.
To send them to another offer in your platform, select the “Network Offer” option. Then, select the secondary offer from the dropdown menu that appears.
To send them to a specific URL, select the “Offer URL” option. Type or paste the URL into the box that appears. If you select this option, no publisher tracking information will be passed to that URL, and no attribution will be credited for the action.
Note: Because this setting relies on the ho_conversions cookie, it only works with pixel-based tracking.
Click Session Lifespan: This setting determines how long a session starting on click can last and still be converted on. You can set the session lifespan to a preset period (like one day or week). TUNE counts each month as 28 days for this setting, which means the lifespan selected may be shorter than expected.
You can specify a custom lifespan by selecting “Custom” from the dropdown menu and entering your desired session duration in hours (up to 17520). For example, if you want to set the lifespan to 120 days, you would multiply 24 hours in a day x 120 days = 2,880 hours.
Impression Session Lifespan: This setting determines how long a session starting on impression can last and still be converted. You can set the session lifespan to a preset period (like one day or week). TUNE counts each month as 28 days for this setting, which means the lifespan selected may be shorter than expected.
You can specify a custom lifespan by selecting “Custom” from the dropdown menu and entering your desired session duration in hours (up to 17520). For example, if you want to set the lifespan to 120 days, you would multiply 24 hours in a day x 120 days = 2,880 hours.
Custom Variables: If you want to add custom parameters to your partner tracking links, this setting will let you set up the functionality. Read more about custom variables here.
Direct Links: If you or your advertisers want to have partners promote the landing page URL directly instead of using your partner tracking links, then the Direct Links tool can help you accomplish this. With this tool, the offer will append the offer & partner IDs to the landing page URL, and a piece of Javascript code will start tracking the session and place a cookie in the user's browser, much like the click redirect typically does.
Deep Links: If this setting is active, partners can direct traffic to a specific page on the advertiser’s site. This is particularly useful for partners working with e-commerce advertisers who want to direct traffic to a specific category or product page. Read our Deep Links article for more information.
Copy Static Parameters to Deep Links: This feature lets you indicate static parameters in the offer URL. For instance, if your offer URL is:
http://www.example.com/location?cid={transaction_id}&source=HasOffers&campaign=12345
Then, enabling this setting adds &source=HasOffers&campaign=12345 to the end of all deep links on this offer. cid={transaction_id} isn’t passed into the deep link, as that isn’t a static value.
This feature is helpful if you have parameters that should always be passed to your offer, like Google Analytics parameters. This setting only takes effect if Deep Links above is “Active.”
Approve Conversions: This setting lets you set all valid conversions from this offer to a “Pending” status in the conversion report. Platform admins or advertisers can then manually approve or reject each conversion. This is usually preferred when there is a higher payout for each conversion, and each conversion is vetted with the advertiser.
Note: If this setting is enabled, partner conversion pixels won’t trigger pixel-based offers.
Multiple Conversions: If you want to allow more than one conversion from a single session, you can enable this setting. When this setting is enabled, multiple conversions are allowed from the same transaction ID. When disabled, de-duplication rejects conversions fired on the same transaction ID.
Start Session Tracking: By default, the session tracking starts at the click when the user is redirected through a partner tracking link. Start Session Tracking also lets you start tracking at the impression instead of the click if you want to place a cookie in the user's browser before they click a tracking link. This setting only appears when using a pixel-tracking attribution method.
Note: By setting to track impressions, each impression for this offer will count towards your click count allocation. This means, for example if this offer tracks clicks on impressions and you have 100,000 impressions for this offer, this will count as 100,000 clicks toward the allocated amount your plan comes with. If you plan to run offers with high impression volume, this setting can quickly drive up your click-overage costs!
Click Macro: To also track clicks in another tracking system when using TUNE tracking links, you can use this setting. With this setting, you can turn on the global click macro for this offer.
When this setting is enabled, another “Custom Click Macro” will appear below it. In that setting, you can enter the custom click macro URL to send clicks. To insert the TUNE partner tracking link, you can use one of the {redirect} or {eredirect} macros in the click macro URL (for unencrypted and encrypted URLs, respectively). If “Custom Click Macro” is disabled, then the global click macro set in the Platform-level tracking settings is used instead.
Encrypted Conversion Tracking: When enabled, this setting encrypts the conversion pixel/postback URL by hashing the offer ID parameter into a shortened URL. Then, any incoming conversions from a non-encrypted URL are rejected. This setting cannot be used with global postback URLs, so leave it disabled if you’re using a global postback URL with your offer.
Subscription: Subscriptions let you set up a recurring payout for partners for an offer by just firing the conversion pixel once. If this setting is enabled, you can set the subscription duration (1 month, three months, six months, one year, or indefinite) and the frequency of the payouts (daily, weekly, monthly, or annually). A subscription must be tied to an existing Customer List for the recurring payouts to take effect.
Customer List: If you or the advertiser want to capture additional information about the user that converted on an offer, like in the case of building lead generation, a Customer List is a tool you can use. When you add a customer list to this offer by enabling this feature, each attribute from the list will be added as a parameter in the offer pixel/postback, and those values will be stored in the customer list to be exported.
Offer Whitelist: When an offer is set up to track with server postbacks, it is usually best practice to add an Offer Whitelist to an offer so postbacks are only allowed from a specified set of IP addresses. If a postback is fired from outside the list of whitelisted IPs, the conversion is rejected. Remember that pixel-based offers cannot use this feature since each conversion will likely occur on a different IP.
When you enable this feature, the “Offer Whitelist” panel appears on the offer’s page. There, you can manage the set of IP addresses that the offer postbacks can be fired.