Setting up Voluum with Your Own Offer (Not from an Affiliate Network)
There are two types of offers:
- Those that come from affiliate networks
- Those that you own
The following document describes how to set up Voluum with your own offer.
Your Own Offer in a Campaign Funnel
When advertising your own offer, an affiliate marketer and an offer owner is the same person. Hence no need for an affiliate network.
This makes a user (affiliate marketer) responsible for:
- Delivering the offer to customers
- Hosting the offer page and subpages, if needed
- Tracking conversions
Affiliate networks take care of all three aspects of maintaining an offer. They deliver, host, and count all conversions. The only thing an affiliate has to do is to direct visitors to this offer and set up passing conversions to Voluum.
Tracking conversions with your own offer
Affiliate networks usually use the postback method to report conversions. Setting up a postback reporting system is difficult and requires some development work. That is why users that work with their own offers usually use a conversion tracking pixel.
This makes sense since, unlike with affiliate networks, a user has control over the offer page so they can implement any tracking script they want. The script should be put on a subpage after the conversion event (a purchase, signup, app-install, or other) occurs. This page is usually referred to as a "Thank You" page.
Before you Start
You need the following things to make a campaign funnel with your own offer work:
- An active Voluum account.
- A traffic source.
- An offer page that is publicly available
- (Optionally) a lander
- A "Thank You" page
Setting up tracking
To set up your campaign in Voluum, you have to add your offer, a traffic source, optionally a lander, and then create a campaign in Voluum that will bind all those elements together. Creating a campaign will provide you with a campaign URL that you will have to submit to your traffic source as a destination URL later.
A “Thank You” page should not be added to Voluum. It is only used to host and launch a Conversion tracking pixel.
A. Add an offer to Voluum. Provide an URL to your offer page as an offer URL. Read the Add an Offer to Voluum article to learn more.
B. Add a traffic source to Voluum. Read the Add a Traffic Source to Voluum from a Template article to learn more.
C. (Optionally) Add a lander to Voluum. Read the Add a Lander Element article to learn more.
D. Create a campaign. Read the Create a Voluum Campaign article to learn more.
Once you have obtained a campaign URL, submit it to your traffic source.
Setting up conversion tracking with a conversion tracking pixel
One you complete the steps listed above, you will have a working campaign funnel and a stream of visitors coming to your offer page. The only thing missing is conversion reporting.
As it was mentioned before, because of the ease of use, the recommended method of tracking conversions is the Conversion tracking pixel. In order to use it, follow the steps below:
- In Voluum, go to the Settings page.
- Go to the Tracking links tab.
-
Copy the conversion tracking pixel. It comes in three forms:
- An URL
- An image
- A script
In most cases, you will want either image or script.
- Paste the conversion tracking pixel in the
<body>section of the web page.
You have now set tracking of your own offer. Once you submit a campaign URL to a traffic source platform, you will get a stream of visitors coming to your offer page. Whenever a visitor clicks your ad, they will be redirected to either a landing page (if you’ve chosen to use one) or directly to your offer page. After a successful conversion, the conversion tracking pixel will report the conversion to Voluum.
Ensuring that conversion tracking will work on all browsers
You can take certain steps to make the Voluum Click ID (needed for conversion tracking) to be saved and passed in 1st party cookies which are NOT blocked by any browser at the moment. To ensure that your conversion tracking is based on 1st party cookies, you have to use a domain for tracking that is generated with the same domain name as your Offer page and "Thank You" page.
The best option would be to create a subdomain especially for tracking purposes.
If your offer and "Thank You" pages use the myexcellentdomain.com, you can create a subdomain called track.myexcellentdomain.com and add id as a custom domain to Voluum.
To learn more about adding a custom domain, read the Adding a Custom Domain article.
Once you have done so, you will have to change the following scripts and URL to the ones with your custom domain:
- Campaign URLs
- Click URLs
- Lander and/or offer tracking scripts
- Conversion Tracking Pixel
