Why Affiliates Need Trackers

OCTOBER 22, 2024 AFFILIATE MARKETING EXPERT OPINION
Why Affiliates Need Trackers
Experts from Keitaro explain why affiliate marketers need trackers and how tracking analytics can help increase the efficiency of advertising campaigns
Keitaro
Keitaro
Article from Tracker Keitaro
Keitaro Tracker is a multifunctional ad tracker designed specifically for digital marketers, media buyers, affiliate marketers, and webmasters. It provides full control over traffic, helps optimize advertising campaigns, and protects your data. It offers tools for launching and managing ad campaigns, data collection and analysis, and testing — all on one platform.

Keitaro was recognized as the Best Affiliate Tool at the MAC'24 conference. The tracker is a leading choice in the CIS market and is expanding into Tier-1 countries. The company has been operating since 2017, and thousands of clients eagerly use this tool.

Table of contents

Why do affiliate marketers need trackers?

Trackers like Keitaro are essential for affiliate marketers to launch, optimize, and monitor advertising campaigns. A tracker helps collect and analyze data on traffic, clicks, conversions, and other metrics. This data allows for more efficient cost management and increased campaign profitability. Keitaro offers features like traffic distribution based on parameters and the multi-offer function, which directs visitors to more relevant offers. It also helps filter bots, minimizing click fraud.

The tracker is a key tool for managing expenses and boosting profitability. Technically speaking, you can work without a tracker if you have just one campaign with one source and one offer. But to see truly great financial results, you need to launch and test multiple campaigns. A tracker helps you see all the results from these campaigns in one place and make timely changes to influence conversion rates.

How tracker analytics can improve the effectiveness of ad campaigns

Tracker analytics allow for a more precise evaluation of campaign results and the ability to make necessary adjustments in real time. Keitaro offers detailed reports and tools for A/B testing of landing pages, offers, and creative materials. This helps find the most effective ad campaign bundles and optimize traffic. You make decisions based on real data, not assumptions, which significantly improves campaign performance.

Trackers help save budgets: you can instantly see which campaigns and bundles aren’t working and adjust or stop them entirely to avoid wasting money. Moreover, you can apply offer capping: for example, if an affiliate network is only willing to pay for 10 conversions per day for offer X, you can set a cap on the number of conversions for that offer in the tracker and redirect the traffic to other offers without such limitations.

Who benefits from trackers, and in which niches?

Trackers are tools for media buyers, publishers, and affiliates. They are needed by webmasters, agencies, teams working with traffic, and digital marketers. Keitaro integrates with platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, and TikTok, making it ideal for analyzing campaigns on social media platforms, search engines, and other channels. More than 500 templates for affiliate and ad networks simplify the setup of postbacks (automatic transmission of information about an action from one platform to another), saving you time. This is especially important for those working in niches with high traffic volumes and multiple offers and traffic sources.

What data can be collected with a tracker?

A tracker helps gather data on conversions, click costs, user behavior on websites, and traffic sources. This information allows for not only optimizing costs but also identifying the most profitable channels and creatives. Additionally, analyzing reports, such as traffic reports, conversion reports, and summary reports, provides a detailed understanding of audience behavior, enabling more precise campaign targeting and strategy improvements. For example, summary reports in Keitaro help group data by parameters such as devices, browsers, and geolocation, enabling traffic source adjustments and budget optimization. Trackers also help detect suspicious activity, block unwanted IP addresses, and prevent fraud, protecting ad campaigns.

Keitaro also allows creating blacklists and whitelists, helping to filter out poor-quality traffic and reduce costs. Details on list settings can be found in the documentation.

What resources can be analyzed with trackers?

Trackers allow you to analyze a wide range of data, including website traffic, landing pages, banners, social media ads, and more. You can track any element incorporating a link, pixel, or QR code, allowing for split testing (A/B testing), redirect setups, and click parameter tracking.

For instance, redirects automatically send users to different pages based on their location or device. This helps affiliate marketers distribute traffic effectively and improve conversions. Split tests compare different landing page versions to determine which one converts better. Click parameters (such as UTM tags) provide precise insights into which traffic sources generate the most sales or leads, helping optimize advertising costs and improve profitability.

Keitaro supports working with local landing pages, simplifying campaign management, eliminating the need for external redirects, and speeding up page load times.

Choosing the right tracker for your needs

Digital Agencies
Если вы или ваши сотрудники работают с рекламными кабинетами пула брендов, вам подойдет трекер, который поддерживает многопользовательский доступ, интеграции с основными рекламными сетями и гибкие настройки отчетности. Keitaro — серверное решение, а значит, обеспечивает высокий уровень контроля над данными и предлагает множество настроек и возможностей кастомизации​. Плюс стоимость лицензии с Keitaro не растет от увеличения количества данных или объема кликов. Вы всегда знаете, какой бюджет выделить на ПО.
Independent Buyers and Arbitrage Marketers
For these users, trackers offer fine-tuned traffic distribution and A/B testing, maximizing ad performance and increasing conversion rates and ROI. You will need a tracker that supports integrations with various platforms and APIs, making it easy to automate workflows.

Can you work without a tracker?

Theoretically speaking, yes. But this would require significant time and technical resources and would not provide the precise and detailed data that a tracker offers. Using a tracker like Keitaro simplifies data collection and analysis, greatly improving overall work efficiency.

When should I consider incorporating a tracker?

We recommend incorporating a tracker in the early stages of your work when you notice the need for deeper analysis and campaign optimization: for example, if you have multiple traffic sources or want to reduce costs and increase conversions, a tracker becomes essential. Keitaro is easily scalable and customizable for different traffic volumes and campaign complexities.

What metrics should less experienced users focus on?

Less experienced users should pay close attention to such metrics as conversions, cost per conversion, ROI, and CTR. Keitaro can group and filter reports, helping users focus on the most important indicators for improving campaign efficiency.

Regardless of traffic volumes, Keitaro provides all the necessary tools for successfully managing ad campaigns and increasing profits.

Traffic-related glossary

An offer means an offer from an advertiser that an affiliate promotes, earning from its sales or generating traffic.

A creative (creative material) is an advertising material designed to attract the audience's attention. These can include banners, email newsletters, videos, showcase websites, case studies, and other elements that help convey the message to the target audience.

Landing is the landing page of a website that a user reaches after clicking on an ad. Landing pages often incorporate marketing triggers to encourage visitors to take the desired actions. This is achieved through catchy headlines, images, slogans, and information about the benefits of the offer.

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a research method. It helps improve website conversions by testing two versions of the same page. Half of the visitors see the original, while the other half sees the modified version. This helps determine which page performs better and generates more sales.

A bundle is a successful combination of all the elements of an advertising campaign. A webmaster chooses such a combination by testing and making adjustments to the campaign based on analytics. If a bundle performs well, the webmaster can use it to attract traffic for an extended period of time.
The components of a bundle include:
  • selecting an affiliate program (AP);
  • the offer for advertising, which can be chosen with the help of an AP manager;
  • the traffic source (it's important to select the offer based on the already existing traffic);
  • pre-landing and landing;
  • target audience and targeting settings;
  • creative materials.
A UTM tag is an analytics tool that helps track where a user came from and how they interacted with the site. For example, using a UTM tag, you can find out that a person came to the webpage from an email newsletter, viewed several pages, and then made a purchase.

ROI (Return on Investment) is a measure of investment profitability. It is calculated using the following formula: (profit – costs) / costs * 100%. If the result is positive, the campaign is profitable; if negative, it results in a loss.

CTR (Click-Through Rate) shows how many people clicked on an ad relative to the total number of its impressions. The CTR formula is as follows: (number of clicks / number of impressions) * 100%. For example, if 100 people saw the ad and 15 of them clicked on it, the CTR would be 15%.

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