Conditional Tracking

This is quite a possible scenario that an advertiser is promoting a product on multiple channels e.g. on affiliate, on search engine, on ad network or any other channel. And this is also quite possible that user might land to advertiser’s site passing through many channels. For example say a user first comes through an affiliate channel but doesn’t perform any action and later on might come through search engine and does some action this time. Now search engine will claim this sale as well as the affiliate and advertiser might land up paying twice for a single sale and the true effectiveness of any particular channel will never come out.

To overcome this kind of situation advertiser can define their set of rules such as last referrer (search engine in above example), or first referrer (affiliate in above example) wins the sale, or the sale will be distributed among all channels.

In conditional tracking advertiser sets its own cookie specific to the particular channel and fires the tracking code accordingly, to track the sales from that channel. E.g. an advertiser is having association with 2 channels say search engine and affiliate network. Now merchant will its set parameters such as referrer or source (it could be any) in the destination URL. So the URL would look like http://www.advertiser.com/?source=Affiliate for traffic coming from affiliate channel or http://www.advertiser.com/?source=search-engine for traffic coming from search engine. Now whenever user clicks on any banner or any link, this parameter (source) is captured at advertisers end and the tracking code specific to that channel only is fired as per the rule set by advertiser (first referrer or last referrer).