What features should a proper tracker have?

[LinkGenius]

Hi,

I have some trouble in finding out what exactly a tracker should do from a publishers perspective. If I Google for it I often come across tracking from the merchants perspective or tools that just throw the most advanced like features "automatically optimizing commission using ai" at me. This makes it very fuzzy for me what the features a tracker should have.

So far I've used GA4 for recording inbound and outbound (affiliate) clicks and I'm thinking about ways to get conversions in it also. But somehow, I think that is not all a tracker does and I'm missing something.

So what (key) features should a proper tracker have? Is its goal purely recording or should it have other features like A/B testing, etc.

 

[Graybeard]

If I were to create a tracker I would start with defining my goals and my data needed to calculate them.

There are 3 (toolish) ways to I know of to track a payable event CPA data

• The best way with GA4 is to have your gtag js on the actual landing page and sequential funnel pages on that vendor/offers website.
• The other way is to record s2s postback data and match it to your inbound data with custom coding (creation of your own api) or using any commercial tracker and capturing the data needed a session,customer id,source,date, other
• There is a third way --the s2s postback from your offer to your ad network ...
  but this is a yes/no 0/1 with maybe a site id returned to you by the ad network.

 

[LinkGenius]

Thank you for your response. I think things are becoming much clearer already.

The best way with GA4 is to have your gtag js on the actual landing page and sequential funnel pages on that vendor/offers website.

This would be perfect for me as publisher, since it would provide information about the users journey on the vendor website. Do vendors allow this commonly? It seems to me for vendors that have many affiliates there are disadvantages/technical challenges for the vendor. If you own the vendor website it would be different of course.

The other way is to record s2s postback data and match it to your inbound data with custom coding (creation of your own api) or using any commercial tracker and capturing the data needed a session,customer id,source,date, other

This sound promising to me. So if I would mark every affiliate link on my site with the GA4 client_id as a reference and have the affiliate network post it back to my website on conversion, let's say like conversion.php?uid={client_id_from_refference}&commission={...}&timestamp={...}. Then all I would have to do is map it to a call to the GA4 measurement protocol as described at Send Measurement Protocol events to Google Analytics | Measurement Protocol for Google Analytics 4 | Google for Developers and I would have the same functionality in GA4 as commercial trackers would have?

Sorry, for the technical details (though I think you won't have trouble understanding). From a functional perspective: If setup as above, I can see in GA4 where each user is coming from, the paths they take on my website (all by default) which affiliate links they click, when and how many commission I earn from each user. Is that the functionality commercial trackers have/need? Or am I still missing something?

 

[Graybeard]

provide information about the users journey on the vendor website. Do vendors allow this commonly?

Some will most will not.

I would have to do is map it to a call to the GA4 measurement protocol as described at Send Measurement Protocol events to Google Analytics | Measurement Protocol for Google Analytics 4 | Google for Developers and I would have the same functionality in GA4 as commercial trackers would have?

no, because it is cross domain as a s2s.
however if you can code a s2s postback script on your server,
collect the data, then post it to google-analytics --in theory that would work with GA4.

I tag each user with a (almost) unique identifier, almost depends on IP staying the same or the AS block (think ISP) staying the same --it's maybe 85% accurate in compiling use and other statistics. Cookies are less than 65% accurate and eventually get deleted long term.

 

[LinkGenius]

no, because it is cross domain as a s2s.
however if you can code a s2s postback script on your server,
collect the data, then post it to google-analytics --in theory that would work with GA4.

Not sure how you mean the cross domain part, but I think have the same idea. The affiliate network makes the s2s postback call to my server, I read the client_id, commission and timestamp from the get parameters and make a call from PHP to GA4 to add the commission to my data. The api_secret for GA4 (needed to make the GA4 api call) would be stored on my server and I would add a secret key of my own to ensure only systems/people with the key can add data to my GA4.

I tag each user with a (almost) unique identifier, almost depends on IP staying the same or the AS block (think ISP) staying the same --it's maybe 85% accurate in compiling use and other statistics. Cookies are less than 65% accurate and eventually get deleted long term.

To keep it simple, for now, I'll read the id from the GA4 Cookie. My plugin already has the ability to overwrite this with your own though. What are the inputs, besides IP, for your uid?

Thanks again for your responses, assuming this is the main feature of a tracker, it has become much clearer what they are. In any case, it will be great to have the sales/commission in GA4, this will be a major step in optimizing my websites.

 

[Graybeard]

some snippets

$cid=ceil($seed/$ipv4address);
$cid = sprintf("%u", ip2long($ip));
$cid = ($random_int . $network . $campaign);
        if  (preg_match("/:/", $ip)){
            $i = (explode(":",$ip));
                $trackid = "$i[0]$i[1]$i[2]$i[3]";
                    $cid = substr(preg_replace("/[A-Za-z]/", '', $trackid), -9);
                }else{

                        $cid = substr(sprintf("%u", ip2long($ip)), -9);
                }