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Guidelines: The Famous Best Tracker Question

trackingdesk

Active Member
Hi Everyone - From time to time, this question shows up on the forum and everyone is rushing in to throw its 2cts (including myself) in order to shed some light on this innocent question.
As you might have seen in the past, my stance is normally the following:

The best tracking is the one that will suit your tracking needs, at a certain point in time.

Everyone with a bit of experience knows that there are many marketing methods, many type of traffic sources and many types of marketing funnels. The combination of all of those, will set the tracking requirements and consequently, not all tracking platforms will suit them all.

Most tracking platform will have about 70% of common features, and it's usually in the 30% that the "fine print" will strike the green light for those particular tracking needs.

While I'd love to say that we have the best tracking platform, I know that others will provide specific features that we do not have. And that's fine.

So when you plan to ask "what's the best tracker", think about the following points before shooting your question:
  • Hosted vs self hosted
  • Integrations with specific traffic sources or affiliate networks
  • Funnel tracking (multiple goals)
  • Tracks Organic Traffic (seo, social)
  • Display banners
  • Built-in Landing page management
  • Custom tracking domains?
  • Pricing (that's not a feature, but it seems to matter)
Providing this information will help everyone feed you with the most accurate and information, so you can quickly get to work.

Happy Tracking!

Laurent
 
It’s completely understandable that people, especially beginners, are struggling with the right choice.

To choose the one tracker that works best for you, you have to spend 5-6 hours per tracker on doing your own research. So if you're hesitant and want to start serious business, trying out different trials is just not the best approach.

I think it is better to check everything directly with the tracker's specialists who will tell you how to get the most of their product and how to run successful campaigns with it.
Sometimes it takes literally 15 minutes with such person and you will have a lot of knowledge on what a particular tracker is capable of.

I am pretty sure that you are able to find 15 minutes, even now, to talk instead of reading everything by yourself. Before making any decision it is better to be sure that you will not lose your money.

Then, if you're convinced you can test a tracker yourself.
 
@trackingdesk has given a good advice on how to choose the tracker. The information is well-structured and points are very clear.

So, let me introduce AdsBridge following this plan)
- Hosted
- Has templates of the most popular traffic sources and affiliate networks
- Funnel tracking
- Organic traffic tracking
- Banners tracking
- Landing editor
- Custom tracking domain and free SSL certificates for domains bought via AdsBridge
- Affordable pricing

And this list is not complete ;) ALL features are available on 14-day free trial.

Ask any questions you have and test AdsBridge to get maximum from your traffic! Register here
 
Last edited:
Following @trackingdesk advice, I would like also to do a small presentation for CPV Lab Pro:

- Self hosted
- Integrations with traffic sources and affiliate networks
- Funnel tracking (multiple goals)
- Tracks Organic Traffic (seo, social)
- Track and Rotate banners
- 100 Custom tracking domains
- ONE time payment or monthly plan (for 12 months only)
- MV Lab (multivariate testing tool) integrated
- 30 days trial

If you have other questions, our team will gladly help you.

Julia from CPV Lab Pro
 
It's like a sales-bomb went off...I really don't care if you use our tracker but here is my personal advice after running a few billion or so clicks over the years:
  1. Does your tracker offer custom domains with ssl and do they require CNAME DNS entries? If you are using a CNAME your tracker's "~5ms redirect" is a joke and meaningless. CNAME lookups in certain geos can take 1200ms alone. Use a tracker that plugs you directly into their DNS.
  2. What are you using to determine statistical significance of your report data? Are you using confidence intervals in a spreadsheet? Not a lot of affiliates will talk about this because they simply don't know about it. Yet if you dig around private, elite forums they're sharing complex CI spreadsheets. You should ask yourself why.
  3. If you're using a self-hosted tracker, are you versed in server management and do you know your way around Ubuntu and various file systems? Are you using a hot-resize capable filesystem and, on top of that, does your hosting service support hot resizes if you need to scale up? What is your scale-up protocol/workflow? Do you have a backup routine? Is your backup routine capable of handling 100k clicks a day? 1m? What is your database recovery protocol and workflow? How long can you be offline? How does your self-hosted tracker separate concerns for session recall and reporting or are they entangled?
  4. If cloud/saas, what does the tracker charge for various add-ons? One domain free? Great. How much is the second? How much is it to add on one additional user?
  5. What kind of traffic are you running and will event overages kill your ROI?
 
Hey guys,
You are right, choosing your best tracker could be a long process.
I faced situations when affiliate changed trackers many times until found the best fit.
My team is working on Binom tracker from 2015. Now we take #2 place by the amount of traffic, according to Adplexity and Mobidea rankings.
Some of the features Binom has:
  • Unlimited domains (with free SLL certs), users, amount of rules, data storage time
  • Flexibility and customization
  • No-redirect tracking (integrated landings and LP Pixel)
  • Triggering system (for example, decreased profit for last hour => you get a message to your phone messenger. Or if any offer is not accessible for some reason – tracker pauses it)
  • Tracking of any events and displaying in reports with any formulas
  • The ideal solution for teams: unlimited users with custom access rights
  • Powerful API for with access to all tracker’s functionality
  • Experienced technical support (always online via email, skype or telegram)
  • Free tracker installation, and server setup + optimization
Find our thread here.

Best wishes,
Binom team
 
MI
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