With my first Father’s Day as a new dad behind me, two things have been made abundantly clear.
First, the days of a comfy eight-plus hours of uninterrupted sleep whenever I want are gone. Second, it is now more important than ever to be able to effectively “stack” tasks to do multiple things at once, or to find ways to be more efficient.
By using S2S you can log how traffic performs on your pre-landers, or how many visitors sign up for a free account, and ultimately how many people actually buy something.
This is good, because at JuicyAds we are always finding ways to help make our clients more productive. It’s hard to find the time to do everything we want to do, but the recent addition of server-to-server performance tracking (S2S) to our network has made running campaigns a whole lot more efficient.
WTF is S2S you ask? It’s a dream for media buyers or campaign managers who want their stats all in one place. It’s a necessity for anyone running large campaigns across multiple traffic sources.
In tech speak, S2S is a “postback” URL that passes conversion data between the server where the “event” has been triggered to another server. It works by placing the postback URL on the page where the event or action you want to track takes place. For example, a new account on a signup page or in the process of handling a credit card payment.
With this technology, any click on an advertisement that results in one of these events can be traced to its origin click from an advertising network like JuicyAds.
At that point, it can be matched against all sorts of interesting data about the click, including the ad zone it came from. With this information, an affiliate or advertiser can easily determine where their sales are coming from — and more importantly — where they are not.
We display the number of events (and their value) to the client, which allows for informed decision making on what traffic sources are working for them. All of this in one place.
If this seems familiar or like it’s not really “that new” it’s because it’s not. Pixel tracking has been around for ages. The biggest difference, however, is that tracking pixels often use cookies in the browser to track where a click came from.
The problem with this (obviously) is that many surfers delete their cookies, they get lost, or people block them from being used in the first place. Most often this is done out of privacy concerns, but in reality cookies aren’t inherently dangerous to privacy to begin with. Cookie-based performance tracking is also susceptible to malicious individuals who may modify the content or stuff them into browsers.
The power of using S2S, instead of tracking pixels, means that it’s not possible for the visitor to merely delete their click. It also isn't easy to negatively manipulate, and privacy isn't a factor bacause many ad networks (JuicyAds included) don't keep personally identifiable information related to each click.
S2S is a much more precise way to track the source of events with no data loss. It makes life a whole lot easier by helping automate the process of optimization of campaigns, decision-making, as well as combining statistics to one location rather than having to compare one to the other by hand.
Each company’s usage and integration of pixels is a little different, so sometimes you need to get creative. Some affiliate programs only allow a global postback (one postback of all events) while some offer more robust campaign-specific options that allow more customization and potentially a more valuable set of data. We offer both.
Global postbacks, for example, can be integrated on many affiliate programs, and even if you’re running 10 different campaigns on our network it will deliver the event data to the origin campaign without placing a bunch of individual pixels, which was previously required with cookie-based systems. Smarter, faster, automated and easy. That’s what S2S is all about.
In December’s edition of XBIZ World, I delved into the value of projecting your revshare profits, which is possible by projecting the value of signups and seeing trends in revenue in order to take informed risks.
Since many S2S systems allow multiple key performance indicators (or KPIs) it’s possible to see the progression of the productivity of your purchased traffic through the entire life cycle.
The most expensive part of any advertising campaign is your initial set of data. From there it’s all optimization and decision making.
By using S2S you can log how traffic performs on your pre-landers, or how many visitors sign up for a free account, and ultimately how many people actually buy something.
By looking at these other indicators more than just the sale, you can project how many of each event is needed to reach your sales goals. It also means you can weed out and optimize sources that aren’t meeting these early KPIs without having to wait forever to see if those clicks convert to sales.
This is super-important when buying on a network like ours where you are buying from thousands of sources at once. Use S2S creatively to exceed your profit expectations.
Juicy Jay is the CEO and founder of JuicyAds, the Sexy Advertising Network. You can follow Jay on Twitter @juicyads, visit JuicyAds.com, or like on Facebook.com/juicyads.