Campaign Tracking Guide - Traffic Sources

Read on - crucial for a successful campaign!

Once you are done creating your campaign and made sure that you have set the standard targeting like country, the most crucial step is to make sure that you are tracking the traffic sources that are sending you traffic.

What is a traffic source (aka subid or source id)?

A traffic source is a specific placement on a website or an app that sends you traffic. Each traffic source is uniquely tagged by an ID. This ID can be passed over to your landing page by using the tracking macro {BV_SRCID}.

What is a macro?

A macro is a placeholder that our platform replaces with the corresponding source ID in real-time, during the redirection process to your landing page.

Take for example the traffic source macro:

https://www.your-page.com/?source={BV_SRCID}

During each redirection process, the macro {BV_SRCID} will be replaced with the traffic source ID so it will end up with something like that:

https://www.your-page.com/?source=d74hfdjd84he0234drfdf
https://www.your-page.com/?source=58gdljkg3905gfk934jd9
https://www.your-page.com/?source=sdfj35sdflkdf94dkfj94
...

As you can see, in this example we were using a URL parameter called "source" to hold the value of the {BV_SRCID}.

What is a URL parameter?

A URL parameter is a way to pass values from one page to another. In this case, we are using the URL parameter "source" to pass the value to your landing page. You can add a URL parameter after the path of your URL - while the first URL parameter must have a preceding question mark (?), the rest must be separated by an ampersand (&), for example:

https://www.your-page.com/?source=sdfj35sdflkdf94dkfj94&parameter2=xyz&parameter3=abc

Now {BV_SRCID} data is being sent to your landing page, what next?

Depending on the tracking software that you use, you need to be able to link conversions (which means any action that creates value for you - like registrations, subscriptions, purchases, downloads etc) - to traffic sources. This way, once traffic and conversions start to flow, you should be able to pull a report from your tracking software that looks something like this one:

If you'll look at the example above, traffic source d74hfdjd84he0234drfdf (the 1st one) sent 2000 visits with 0 conversions, so you may want to block it (or just decrease its bid), while traffic source 58gdljkg3905gfk934jd9 generated 11 conversions with 120 visits, so you may want to keep this one running, or even increase its bid.

What about source sdfj35sdflkdf94dkfj94? Well this one sent only 5 visits so not much you can learn from it - let it run until it sends more users. 

I found a source that I want to block. How do I do that?

That's easy - please follow this link to learn how:
https://bidvertiser.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008803299-Blacklist-Subids

I need to set a specific bid to some sources - how do I do that?

That's easy as well - please follow this link to learn how:
https://bidvertiser.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360008728480-Bid-Override

Is it all a one-time process that I need to follow?

Absolutely not, you may want to constantly track and optimize your campaigns. New sources are added on a daily basis, while old ones may either leave or require an higher bid (or lower). As time goes by you can decrease the frequency of the optimization of course (for well established campaigns), but for any new campaigns we strongly recommend to optimize frequently.