If you:
- Put ads on your own websites or by paying for ad space
- Have a brand that you want to introduce to the public
- Are a media buyer for your customers
- Manage an affiliate network and hire affiliates and want to track their progress
- Are a product or app owner (especially influenced by the iOS 14.5 update) and you want market it yourself
- Are a big ad company that is looking for a custom solution that will unleash its full potential
…then Yes!
If anything from that list sounds familiar to you, an ad tracker will be extremely useful, if not essential for you. All alternatives, such as putting everything into Excel, relying on your gut feeling, using rudimentary report systems of various ad networks or even choosing a free alternative such as Google Analytics will always put you behind the people that opted for a dedicated tool.
How an Ad Tracker Can Optimize, Manage or Boost your marketing efforts
An ad tracker is either cloud-based or self-hosted platforms designed to be a central dashboard for your marketing efforts, no matter what they are.
The most advanced ones, like Voluum, not only track and measure your campaigns, but also let you automate, optimize and empower your advertising efforts to maximize your results. You can integrate with other platforms you work with – sources of traffic, affiliate networks, ad networks and others – to work from one platform.
An ad tracker allows you to:
- access all types of user-generated activities (no matter if those users are visitors that click on ads, app users, or affiliates you work with),
- condense data into detailed reports, automate various tasks (such as pausing campaigns or changing bids when set conditions are met),
- and present or give access to the recorded data to your coworkers or third-parties.
On top of that, the flexibility of tracking platforms like Voluum enables simple made-to measure solutions for bigger players that require a more customized approach.
If you don’t believe me (and there’s no reason to believe from the start 😉 ), here’s the list of the most common cases where having an ad tracker such as Voluum can be helpful and beneficial.
1. Affiliate marketer
Hey, affiliate, you were the reason Voluum was born in the first place.
This is why our tool allows you to track every parameter of your campaign: offers, creatives, referrer links, carriers, browser versions, device models and so on. You get extensive data analytics from organic and paid traffic acquired across numerous sources.
As a tool for campaign tracking and conversion attribution it uses a safe and cookie-less server-to-server postback URL method. While it handles billions of clicks daily, with multiple groupings, filters and optimization features available, you can focus on improving advertising performance.
All in all, Voluum has what you need to succeed in affiliate marketing in 2021:
If you’re an affiliate, there is simply no reason for you not to use Voluum.
2. Brand manager & agency owner
Managing a brand is not easy, we know that, both by listening to our clients and from our own experience. No matter if we talk about a new brand that is yet to make itself recognizable or a well-established brand that needs to expand its reach: You have a lot of tasks on your hands.
Let’s analyse this headache one problem at a time.
You have a lot of channels to handle: paid social advertising, influencers, paid search and classic organic traffic.
Many companies treat each channel almost like a separate dominion and hire people for handling each channel – which is almost as big of a tragedy as delegating all this work into one person.
Multiple people means poorer communication and separate budgets. One person means being overwhelmed with data.
But one or a few people backed by an ad tracker means consistent data and a clear picture.
Your paid social or search campaigns can be tracked with Voluum. Voluum synchronizes cost data with Facebook and Google using API, so you know you will always have the right data.
As for influencers, you can create separate ad campaigns and track their progress using the Revshare (or other) cost model. You will know how much you owe them and how much money they brought for you.
You can also track those people that have stumbled on your website organically.
If brand owners would like to be kept in the loop and have access to fresh and accurate data, you can generate a shared report. It works like this: you outline a set of data that brand owners or other 3rd parties need to have access to and generate them a special link. The only thing left to do is to provide them this link.
Once someone clicks it, they can see not only static data (for example: profits for June) but also dynamic data (profits from the last 7 days). All that without the hassle of giving them access to Voluum.
Oh, you WANT to give them access to Voluum? No problem, create a separate workspace for them and decide what kind of data (which columns and which campaigns) should be accessible, and invite them as “Workers” on your account.
Brands often benefit from advertising using native traffic. The best source for native traffic is a demand-side platform such as Voluum DSP which taps into the inventory of many ad networks at once.
No banner with provided ID foundLuckily, Voluum Tracker and Voluum DSP are two complementary solutions built on the same architecture. Get Voluum Tracker and you will have access to Voluum DSP automatically.
3. Media buyer
Purchasing ad space on behalf of your clients means keeping a lot of balls in the air. If you work with advertising giants like Facebook or Google, you probably have more than one account. Making sense of data scattered between various accounts is virtually impossible.
Voluum allows you to keep all the data in one place. Track your campaigns across multiple accounts and get cost data using API integration.
Facebook media buyers that deal with iOS traffic face an additional challenge due to recent changes in Apple’s privacy policy. In short, with Voluum you can track conversions with the Voluum conversion tracking pixel that will use 1st party cookies. If you go with simply putting the Facebook pixel on your product page, cookies left by this pixel will be treated as 3rd party, and therefore blocked on Safari, and in the future, on other browsers.
Or, dear Facebook media buyer, you can send conversions through Voluum to Facebook and optimize your campaigns there if you prefer. Voluum is versatile enough to fit your needs.
If you buy media on platforms such as Taboola or Outbrain, you are probably a bit frustrated by the lack of reporting data. Listen, these companies focus on managing ad inventory, not on building a powerful tracking engine.
That’s our job.
If you connect them with Voluum, you will get access to layers of additional data, complex reports and much more.
Did you ask about automation? I’m sure of it.
For both Taboola and Outbrain, you can create rules that pause your campaigns, adjust placement bids, or send you an alert when set conditions are met.
4. Affiliate network owner
Running your own affiliate network is easy – if you have, like, three affiliates and two offers. Anything beyond that is a hassle.
Think about your responsibilities:
- You have to track the performance of each affiliate
- Manage what offers and landing pages they have access to
- Calculate your affiliate’s payouts
- Work out your profit
Fortunately, if you use Voluum as the basis of your network, you won’t have to figure it all out on your own. Voluum has been built with team collaboration in mind and allows you to invite coworkers while restricting their access to various elements of your marketing efforts.
Or for easier scaling, you can treat each affiliate as a separate campaign and the track traffic they bring and the outcomes they generate. Assign them different offers and see how well your affiliate performs. Set and receive alerts to know if their performance drops.
Voluum allows for more advanced scenarios. Want to give API access to connect with third party platforms? You can do that. Want to handle affiliate and your own traffic as well? No problem. Want to share data with your partners or customers without giving them access to Voluum? You can do that with ease.
For more information, go to our dedicated article describing how to set Voluum as a basis of your affiliate or partnership network.
5. App owner
Did you develop your own mobile game and want to advertise it? You need a Voluum and AppsFlyer combo.
The first one will deal with standard marketing campaign tracking on paid sources, while the second one, as a mobile attribution tool, will track app installs and in-app activities.
You need to take care of both of these aspects in order to run a successful mobile app campaign.
Luckily, Voluum and AppsFlyer are integrated partners.
But wait, you may ask, what about iOS and the lack of access to IDFA? How can I track campaigns of those users that have opted out from tracking?
Simple: by using Voluum.
For more information, I recommend you read our article on how the iOS 14.5 update affects ad tracking. But here’s the summed up version: because of this update, Apple handles conversion attribution by itself and doesn’t share click ID data with AppsFlyer. So AppsFlyer cannot send a click ID in the postback URL.
For most trackers, that would be it. But not for Voluum – we can accept postbacks with no click ID info, as long as a campaign ID is sent, which will be supported by AppsFlyer.
Having no click ID will make accurate conversion attribution impossible – there will be no way of connecting a concrete ad click with a specific conversion – but at least you will be able to track how many people clicked that ad, downloaded your app and, for example, reached a certain level in a game.
Voluum is the only ad tracker on the market that supports such a scenario, and rightly so: we really want to be ahead of the game, not just react to the outcome.
6. Ad company looking for a custom solution
We at Voluum have a long history of developing features requested specifically by big customers. Companies don’t get big by doing the same thing as everyone else. By implication, big companies need tools that can do more than what is needed by smaller players.
We thrive on such challenges.
We had a customer that needed to forward impression (page view) data to other parties. So we developed the Impression Pixel Forwarding feature that does just that. And gave access to it to all our customers. One company’s idea becomes a gain for all.
Another customer liked our Conversion cap feature and asked us to do the same thing but for clicks. Now all Voluum users can benefit from the Click Cap feature.
Handling postbacks with no click IDs source came from our side as a countermeasure towards restrictions introduced by the iOS14.5 update, as well as requests from two other customers. The number of ways it turned out to be useful surprised even us: app tracking, tracking Amazon affiliates, offline conversion tracking and so on.
We like situations when a change in the way we handle information for one customer opens a new door for several other people and adds a new way for people to use Voluum.
An affiliate marketing ad tracker can help you advertise better
If you work in the marketing field and you feel that your existing tools lack certain features or limit you in any way, reach out to us or book a demo. We can promise that we will consider any request and analyse any use case.
Did you see a use for an ad tracker for yourself above? Then get Voluum and leave tracker-less campaigns to the amateurs.
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