Introduction

Understanding where your traffic is coming from and how users interact with your Offers is crucial for optimizing your marketing campaigns. That's where Click Tracking in Everflow comes in. It's the essential process of monitoring and recording each click on your affiliate links or ads.

Tracking clicks on your Offers, starts with the Tracking Link and possibly the Tracking Domain.

What is a Tracking Domain?

This is a domain that you own and control. It's dedicated to tracking your own campaigns and offers. Tracking Domains are used specifically to generate Redirect Links as you’ll read below.

Important facts about Tracking Domains:

• You can have multiple domains
• You can choose to associate any domain available to you to an Offer
• There is always one domain that is labeled as Default, meaning each Offer is set to use this domain by default  
• You can change the domain for an Offer at any given moment

What is a Tracking Link?

Tracking Links are specially crafted URLs that allow you to precisely track where your traffic is coming from and how it's performing. This is the link that you’ll share with your Partners to drive traffic, sometimes also known as affiliate links..

Here’s two important properties of Tracking Links:

1. Each Partner has their own Tracking Link for every Offer.
2. Tracking Links can be generated on any tracking domain available to you.

How do Tracking Links Work?

Imagine a customer journey where someone clicks on an ad, which leads them to a landing page, and eventually, they make a purchase. Click Tracking focuses on the first part of that journey:

• Clicking on an Offer’s Ad
• Being directed to the Default Landing Page URL configured in the Offer’s settings
• The click being recorded in Everflow

In order to understand Click Tracking, we need to understand Tracking Links on a deeper level. Both concepts are heavily intertwined.

The Two Linking Types

Redirect Linking

Redirect linking is the default Linking Type for each Offer. Redirect Linking means that there is a redirect involved between the Tracking Link and the Default Landing Page URL.

Here’s a visual that might help explain it better:

Here’s the Click Tracking flow with Redirect Linking:

1. Visitor clicks on the Tracking Link (where the Linking Type is Redirect)
2. The Tracking Link routes to an Everflow Tracking Domain where:
   
   • A Transaction ID (TID) is generated
   • A Cookie (third-party) is set on the Tracking Domain that stores the TID
   • A Click is recorded (which effectively is the same thing as the TID being generated)
3. The Visitor is now redirected from the Tracking Domain to the Offer’s Default Landing Page URL
   
   • The Default Landing Page URL will have the TID appended to it for later use

Tracking Link Format With Redirect Linking

Direct Linking

Direct Linking is the other Linking Type and is turned off by default. Direct Linking is when there is no redirect between the Tracking Link and the Offer’s Default Landing Page.

Here’s a visual that might help explain it better:

But that’s only part of it.

How Are Clicks Recorded With Direct Linking?

The part that’s missing in the diagram above is how the Click is recorded. Which is different from the Redirect Linking scenario.

Here’s the Click Tracking flow with Direct Linking:

1. Visitor clicks on the Tracking Link (where the Linking Type is Direct)
2. The Tracking Link routes the Visitor to the Default Landing Page URL
3. Everflow’s Click Script is installed on the Landing Page which does the following:
   
   • Fetches the Offers ID & Affiliate ID from the URL parameters
   • Makes a call to Everflow’s servers with the above parameters
   • Everflow generates a Transaction ID (TID) and sends that in the call response
   • The Click Script then stores the TID in a Cookie (first-party) on the same domain as the Default Landing Page
4. A Click was registered in Everflow when the TID was generated

Here’s a the full picture in a visual:

Tracking Link Format With Direct Linking