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Tracking Methods
- Per Sale: By establishing a Cost-Per-Sale campaign within DirectTrack you can compute affiliate commissions based upon the gross amount of a sales and assign a flat amount, a percentage, or a recurring commission structure. A Cost-Per-Sale campaign requires you to place a 1x1-tracking pixel on your confirmation page and dynamically embed the Sale Amount and a Transaction ID to populate the fields in the pixel.
- Per Lead: DirectTrack supports two primary methods of tracking leads. The first, pixel tracking, has minimum impact upon your current process. You simply create the campaign and then place a small invisible piece of tracking code onto your final thank-you page. When the page is loaded the partner who delivered the lead is immediately credited for that lead. Optionally, you can even use DirectTrack to capture your leads directly by making use of the systems ability to host a highly customizable signup page.
- Per Impression: Impressions are automatically tracked for banner ads, and you can turn on the ability to track impression in HTML ads as well. In banners ads, DirectTrack simply counts 1 impression each time the banner loads on the affiliates page. This is done when the code on the site makes a call to our servers to call up and load this banner. For HTML ads there are two options for tracking impressions. First, DirectTrack can automatically imbed a 1x1 pixel into your html code that when called will track an impression. Secondly, you can choose to have a JavaScript code automatically placed in the HTML which will track the impression."
- Per Click: DirectTrack tracks every click generated by your partners. The frequency used by the system to determine a unique click is customizable based upon your needs, but defaults to a single click within a 24-hour period.
Linking Methods
- Default Linking: Default Linking refers to the normal linking path that the DirectTrack system produces in order to transfer a user from an affiliates site to your website. Using our default method will pass the user through the DirectTrack servers at which point we place a cookie on their PC telling us what affiliate sent them, the creative they clicked on, the time and day the click occurred, the referring url, and the IP address by which the user is coming from. These cookies then tie into the tracking code on your site or your advertisers site and enable us to track sales and leads to the appropriate affiliate.
- DirectLink Tracking: DirectLink is a more advanced linking method that does not require a redirect through the DirectTrack servers. In this method, the user would simply go directly from the affiliate to your landing page. You would then be required to place a JavaScript code on all of your landing pages that would enable us to look up the referring url to find which affiliate had sent them, and place a cookie on their PC. In this method, you have the option of adding two variables to the end of the url string to pass the creative and affiliate ID. This is useful for affiliates bidding on keywords. The other option is you can use pure links, which do not pass any variables to the landing page. This method is best for assisting in improving your natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.
- Custom URL: This option enables you to add your own redirects for both the linking URL’s and the image URL’s. The purpose of this is for those who plan on allowing their affiliates to send email on their behalf. By adding in this redirect, it would ensure that Direct Response would not receive any Spam complaints should someone complain about your affiliates list. Direct Response has a strict Spam policy and does not condone Spamming by any means.
Optional Items
- Private Domain: The standard method for our DirectTrack clients and their partners to access the system is by using a URL of the form http://YOURSITE.directtrack.com. If you would like a higher level of control over your partner's experience you can even use your own domain for accessing your DirectTrack system such as http://partners.YOURSITE.com. This would result in all of the tracking codes used by your partners to make use of the same private domain name. To implement this upgrade feature, you would need to obtain a domain, and point the DNS record for the domain to an IP address that we would provide. It is also recommended that you obtain an SSL Certificate for this domain based on the Certificate Request information we provide
- Dedicated Servers/Service Level Agreement: Most clients all share the same pool of web and database servers. For organizations that generate a large amount of traffic and/or operate their core business on the DirectTrack platform, you have the option to upgrade to a dedicated infrastructure which will segment you account from the rest of our clients, yet still enable you to use our shared resources should you need to.
- SOAP API: For the advanced user, we can provide you with a Web Services interface to automatically pass or retrieve data from your DirectTrack system. This is commonly used to update stats, removed canceled sales, validate leads, or pull your statistics into your own reporting system. There are over a dozen standard functions in this interface, which is included with the Merchant Pro and Network Version.
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