While many offers out there are taking place on the web, software providers often also want to get into partner marketing and offer incentives to partners for driving installs of their software.
Using the postback tracking method, you can run traffic to your software offering, and track the installation inside the software. Using cookie-based tracking methods won’t work in this situation because the cookie placed in the user's browser cannot be read from an external software application.
The main issue with tracking installs inside software is passing a transaction ID to the software. Usually, desktop software is compiled; the code cannot be modified and no custom parameters can be passed into the application.
The best way to approach tracking installs is to pass the transaction ID to a codebase that is not yet compiled, and then once the transaction ID is passed to this codebase, it is compiled dynamically, and then ready for the user to download.
This setup will vary for each platform and programming language used, but the concept remains the same:
- The tracking link generates the transaction ID and passes it to the offer URL
- The transaction ID is passed along to the download page
- The transaction ID is passed into the postback URL, which is set up inside the source code for the application. The postback is not fired yet. The logic is added to the source code to fire the postback during installation.
- The source code for the application is compiled into an executable file, whether that be .exe (Windows) or .dmg (OSX).
- The download of the application file starts on the user's computer
- During the install sequence, the postback is fired from inside the application, recording the conversion inside TUNE
