Learning to work with the tracker. Installing and setting up a free cpa tracker A good tracker or TDS for arbitration

What is a tracker?

The core of any arbitration is a tracker - this is a system that allows you to receive traffic from sources and distribute it as TDS according to specified parameters to the necessary resources, as well as keep statistics of all traffic and envelope parameters for further analysis.

At first glance, there are very few differences from TDS, but in reality the real tracker is very far from TDS in terms of its broader functionality, even from the notorious keytarotds, which Lately Positions itself as a tracker, although in fact it’s as good as a normal tracker, it’s like walking to the moon, and with the updated interface it absolutely kills.

What is a tracker for?

The tracker boosts your output. An arbitrator simply cannot live without him. A doorway tracker can also be useful for tracking traffic from their sites. Monitor which keys and countries bring the most profit in order to focus your attention on them.

The tracker is needed so that you can see which sites are giving you an envelope, and based on this data, make black or white lists when purchasing traffic.
Similarly, filter traffic by operating systems, countries, device models, providers and other parameters.

Good TDS!= good tracker

Yes, at the beginning of my arbitration journey I tried to use keytarotds as a tracker, because updated version Keytarki was advertised with the necessary functionality for an affiliate marketer. But I immediately abandoned it due to the sluggishness of the work, the high response rate, the unbearable interface for viewing statistics and the inability to view parameters by slice.

Selecting a tracker

In a relatively small tracker market, I chose the little-known tracker Pixelk. It won with its price of $49 per month, server solution and the functionality I needed, when all the alternatives in most cases were cloud solutions with a price of $100 or more, depending on the amount of traffic transferred. This tracker has no restrictions on traffic, transfer at least a million uniques per day, the main thing is that the server supports it. In terms of performance on a 4-core server with 32 gigs of memory with daily traffic of 200k-300k, I did not notice any load activity at all, the processor was loaded by no more than 5-10%.

Tracker capabilities.

The tracker's capabilities are amazing, and the speed and response of this tracker made me go crazy a couple of times. The speed of operation of this tracker is one of the main advantages, and information about clicks and conversions can be stored for as long as desired, while the tracker’s performance remains at the same level.

The main window looks laconic and not overloaded. You can see the most important campaign information at a glance.

Filter campaign displays by various parameters:
- by group
— by traffic source
- according to the keyword in the title
- only with leads
- by date
- marked with a star

Campaign statistics

In the statistics for each campaign, we can see how a particular landing page or offer converts. View statistics by day of the week, group by any parameters, look at conversion logs, and logs of the so-called sewer.

We can group information according to all the parameters that can be obtained, and most importantly, look at conversion in sections to identify parameters for which ROI is low or high.

For example, if you want to optimize a campaign based on launch time, look at the information by hours per day.

You can look at the cross-section in three parameters at the same time.
For example, in the stat below we look at which language with which OS converted better at a certain hour.

Extensive filtering capabilities allow you to obtain information of absolutely any type.

Traffic Separator

This is the so-called cloaca, which is built into the tracker. Allows you to redirect traffic to a given offer, or URL, based on a bunch of parameters. It serves to filter traffic and optimize the envelope, and also works well for promoting gray landing pages.

Landing page grabber

Grabbing landing pages in one click. Allows you to collect competitors’ landing pages with minimal effort, and in a few clicks add a landing page to a working campaign for conversion testing.

Landing page anti-spy

Allows you to avoid having your landing page exposed to bots, landing page parsers and other analytical rabble.

And also a bunch of other possibilities that could be listed for a very long time...
— adjust the loss of traffic coming from the exchange as a percentage
— calculate bot sites
— Double Meta Refresh redirect so as not to burn the traffic source referrer
— conduct A/B testing of landing pages and offers in all possible variations
— send non-unique visitors according to a given rule
— show information about the user on the landing page, for example operating system, phone model, etc.
— export any statistics to EXCEL
— add as many domains as possible to which you can send traffic
— perform random rotation of domains when sending a user from a landing page to an offer
— update information about conversions and payments for any period of time
— add as many users as you like
- etc...

conclusions

I've been using the tracker for a whole month, I'm happy with everything. In terms of functionality, I don’t even know what else you could want, it feels like the developers have taken into account absolutely everything that an arbitrator needs. If you have questions about the tracker, ask in the comments. If the information on arbitration is interesting, one of these days I will write an article about setting up a tracker and launching the first campaign. Happy start of the season everyone! Let's collect the cream before New Year's Eve 2017!

P.S.

All blog readers can use a coupon, which gives them the opportunity to evaluate the tracker completely free of charge without any restrictions for 30 days.

Today we will talk about the most popular trackers that have proven themselves to be good in the field of arbitration, but first, let’s define what a tracker is and why it is needed in general.

Why do you need a CPA tracker?

Not a single affiliate marketer can imagine his work without a tracker. Sometimes, to analyze incoming traffic, there is not enough data only from Yandex.Metrica or Google Analytics. Trackers provide more extensive functionality that will help analyze advertising campaigns as a whole, divide traffic into streams, provide visual statistics on expenses and income, and the list of “usefulness” of using trackers does not end there.
Let's talk about each popular tracker separately. So, let's go.

AdsBridge

Price: trial version (14 days), then from $89 per month

Description: This tracker definitely deserves attention from affiliate marketers. AdsBridge stores information in the cloud, that is, it does not require installation, has a highly customizable system for monitoring campaigns, its own TDS tracker, a reporting system that can be uploaded to a file, and also, for an additional fee, a landing page builder.

Cpatracker

Price: Free version (with paid support) / tariffs from 1000 to 5000 rubles. per month.

Description: One of the most popular trackers on the Runet. It has a built-in TDS tracker that will allow you to redistribute users to different offers and different targets. Can be either cloud or self-hosted, depends on tariff plan.
Suitable for beginners in arbitration. For ease of use, the tracker integrates 100 CPA networks and 62 advertising networks.
To understand how the tracker works, you will have to spend from half an hour to an hour, however, it is worth it.

OctoTracker

Price: 2400 - 8500 rub. per month

Description: a powerful tool with wide capabilities. Allows you to upload reports on more than 20 sections, supports the most popular partnership programs(more than 60), supports the most popular traffic sources (also more than 60), allows split testing of offers and pre-landers, and is equipped with its own TDS, which distributes traffic according to more than 25 parameters. It can be either self-hosted or cloud, depending on the tariff plan.

Price:$247 per year, subscription renewal after the first year is $147.

Description: allows you to collect statistics on more than 20 parameters, redirect on 23 parameters, includes up to 100 custom domains.
You should be careful when transferring data from server to server. There have been cases where the encoding was changed during data transfer, resulting in campaigns that were ciphers.

Prosper202

Price: Free

Description: one of the oldest trackers that has proven itself in this field. Has wide functionality and supports keywords in Russian, flexible filters.
All collected information is easy to track and filter. Self-hosted.

Cons: lack of a TDS tracker (can be connected in the paid version), cannot work with mobile offers

Price:$99 – $999 per month.

Description: Suitable for working with Burj traffic. This tracker is a cloud solution; data is stored in the cloud from 6 months to two years, depending on the tariff plan. Wide functionality, real-time tracking, filtering by country, network, OS, browser, device type. Very convenient for generating reports.

ClickMeter

Price:$29 – $349 per month. Eat free version for 1000 events per month.

Description: ClickMeter is not really a tracker, it is a link manager. That is, we add a link to the system and work with it, redirect, track visits and conversions. Includes 26 options for working with redirects, collecting statistics on 18 parameters.
Cloud. Not supported by all browsers, works stably in Google Chrome.

iMobiTrax

Price:$179 per month + $99 installation fee (optional)

Description: the most powerful tool for working with mobile streams. You can track statistics on 40 parameters, there is an API.

Price:$69 per month. Free period - 14 days

Description: A high-speed tracker that processes requests in a record 5 ms. Wide functionality. Multi-level reports that are downloaded instantly, targeting filtering in 30 directions, the ability to create rules based on 20 parameters. Self-hosted. Free support helps with installing the tracker on the server.

Price:$25 – $499 per month. There is a free plan for 100,000 events per month.

Description: the tracker has its own TDS, which allows you to distribute traffic according to 18 parameters. Uploading all standard reports + by IP ranges, mobile operators, browsers and more. The tracker allows you to integrate landing pages and conduct split tests. Cloud means working online, that is, it does not require installation.

So we introduced you to the most famous trackers. Which tracker to use in your work is up to you.

The tracker is an indispensable tool for arbitrage traders. It helps to separate traffic, track efficiency, do A/B tests, calculate profit and ROI. I use a tracker to separate traffic when I stream from VK/OD/Instagram public pages. There are many solutions, but the principle of operation is similar for all, and we will look at their work using the example of CPA Tracker.

It's free if you put it on your own domain. Installation is simple and does not take much time. The instructions are on their website.

CPA Tracker allows you to divide traffic by platform, GEO, device, IP and even providers. For example, M1-Shop does not have adaptive landing pages, so we need to divide traffic into mobile and desktop. This is done like this:

2 . Go to the tracker and select “Offers”.

3 . Enter a custom name and link, click “Add”.

5 . Select “Add conditions” - “OS” - “All mobile” and select our mobile landing page on the side. We send the rest of the visitors to the desktop.

Another example. In the case about Aliexpress, miles were poured from public pages, which means it was necessary to divide the traffic into device types. These are the settings we set:

You can also track leads received through the affiliate program in the tracker. Go to the "Tools" section and select "Integration with CPA networks". We select the affiliate program we are using, for example AD1, and get a link to insert.

Go to AD1, select an offer, create a flow. Select " Additional settings" and insert your link into the postback field.

If the tracker is installed and configured correctly, then as soon as the first clicks and conversions begin, you will immediately see it. This way you can analyze and optimize your campaigns.

The main reasons why you can’t live without TDS:
- the affiliate program does not accept traffic from certain countries, in this case, we will send traffic from an unsuitable country to another affiliate program and perhaps get more money;
- the affiliate program accepts exclusively I-OS or Android traffic, but nevertheless you don’t want to waste desktop traffic;
- the affiliate program suddenly “fell”, “disappeared”, the offer was turned off and the traffic went nowhere - if there is a TDS, redirecting traffic to another affiliate will take a minute.

What do you need

Let's unzip, we see three folders - track, track-common, track-show - we need them all.

2. Register for hosting - choose the Blog tariff, it will be quite enough.

3. Register a domain and attach it to hosting, create login information via ftp to your hosting. My good advice is not to use free domains for this purpose, because one fine day it will all be lost, and you have only yourself to blame.

4. Via ftp, create a subfolder in the public_html folder, where we will install our TDS. I tried to install this cpa tracker in the root directory, but something went wrong, but it is installed in a subfolder one-two-three. In the subfolder where the tracker will be installed, load all three folders - track, track-common, track-show.

The structure should look like this

5. In the hosting control panel, go to the MySQL section

And create a database

6. In the browser, go to the address your-domain.ru/subfolder_name/track-show

The database name and username are the same, those from step 5.
- password - again from point number five.
- leave the database server and server type unchanged, as in the picture.

7. The next step is to enter the address Email and administrator password - these data are subsequently used to log in.

8. That's it, installation is complete. To correctly record and display transitions, you need to configure two tasks to run regularly (every minute or a little less often). The tracker will not let you forget about it - system messages clearly show what needs to be done and how

Go to the crontab section

And we set up two tasks to be executed every minute.

As you can see, I have it set to every minute and every 5 minutes. Clicks - every minute, sales data updates - every 5 minutes.

9. The most delicious and important thing is setting up links. In the “Offers” section, enter the name of the link and the link itself. In the future, they can only be deleted, they cannot be changed.

10. Go to the links section and add rules by which the tracker will filter and send incoming traffic.

In my example:
- green color since it does not accept traffic from Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Belarus, therefore I send traffic from these countries to an affiliate program;
- Blue colour if the user's browser language is Azerbaijani/Uzbek/Kazakh/Belarusian/Ukrainian, then we will send such a user to ;
- black color- All users mobile devices will go to paid SMS from .
- Red color- everyone else will go to;
- pink color- by clicking on the first square, a link is displayed directly to which traffic should be sent.

Those who are attentive have noticed that a user from Kazakhstan with a Kazakh language localization of the browser using a phone falls in this case immediately under three conditions for redirecting traffic. How it will work in this case - I don’t know, my goal was to show the potential possibilities of redirecting traffic at one moment using many options and conditions.

To record and analyze statistics on conversions during traffic arbitrage, trackers - services or special software - are used. Their use in arbitration allows you to see the whole picture and analyze the advertising campaign, which gives access to a higher level of work in CPA.

Here are the advantages of this tool:

• Full control over all parameters of the advertising campaign.
• Clear division of traffic into streams (segmentation).
• Split testing of offers and landing pages automatically.
• Visual statistics on expenses and income, which greatly facilitates the optimization of advertising campaigns.
• The ability to replace a link without re-moderating an ad is important when changing an affiliate network or an offer to more favorable conditions.
• The ability to hide information about traffic from the network - it is known that networks use other people’s work.

Types of trackers for arbitration.

• Installable on your domain and hosting.
• When used as an online service.

There are several well-known tools for collecting and analyzing statistics, and some experienced affiliate marketers order trackers from programmers.

Of the ready-made, most popular Russian-language ones:

• Bombadeal — great system with the ability to work in free access mode and does not require installation. It has a tracker with good functionality and various tools for automating and managing advertising campaigns.

• Cpatracker(https://www.cpatracker.ru/price/) is installed on your hosting or used online (with a free trial period of 10 days).

See how to set up Postback in this service to track all conversions from advertising.

From English speakers:

• Prosper202(http://prosper.tracking202.com/apps/), installed on hosting;
• Volume(https://voluum.com/), working as an online service.

As an example, I'll show you how to use Prosper.

Installing a tracker

To install Prosper202 on your hosting, you need to have a clean domain with a database on which there are no files, or make a subdomain (for example treking.site.ru) and install a tracker on it (you need to copy or write down the site data - database name, username, password, hostname).

So, everything is clear with the domain, now download the archive with the files of the official website (link above):

We unpack the downloaded archive and, using an FTP client (for example FileZilla), transfer all the files from the open unpacked folder to your domain (or subdomain). Next, go to your website and see the picture:

where they write that we do not have enough configuration file. Click on the link:

Here we are warned that we remember your hosting details. Click next:

and fill in with what you saved: database name, username, password, hostname. Do not touch the last field and click next. In the next windows that open, click the green button, and in this one fill in the fields: your email, time zone, name and password

The next window will show your account registration details (write them down or remember them), click on the link

How to set up an advertising campaign in the tracker?

To integrate the tracker with CPA network you need to contact the network manager (support service) so that they can help you complete this setup, since the settings are also different in different networks.

The video tutorial shows basic settings in the “Prosper202” tracker, the only thing is that they are designed to launch popander advertising on a bourgeois site, so do not be confused by unfamiliar terms and take these nuances into account when filling out the fields. And please note that the video indicates advertising payment for impressions; you may have payment for clicks.

So, in your account, click on the “Prosper202CS” button, then “setup” (settings), the rest is from the video:

Use traffic trackers when working in arbitration, you will see how convenient and effective it is.