Photo by Nesa by Makers

When it comes to performance marketing, one of the biggest questions you can ask yourself (or your advertiser) is what kind of conversion tracking protocol you want to use: pixel tracking (client-side) or postback tracking (server-side). There are benefits and disadvantages to each, and it’s important to distinguish between them if you wish to be successful. So, let’s break it down.

First — definitions:

Pixel Tracking

Also called client-side, cookie-based, in-browser tracking. This method relies on the user’s browser to track conversions by placing a cookie on the click that is called again on conversion to authenticate the session and attribute the conversion to the correct affiliate. Pixel-based offers use cookies to track because they can store the session values in the cookie, and with the way pixels are designed to track, can extract this information from the browser easily. As a result, setting up an offer to track using pixels is very simple and only involves placing the HTML offer pixel on the conversion page.

Use pixel tracking when:

TUNE’s general recommendation is to use pixel tracking as little as possible, as pixel tracking only works for non-mobile web traffic where cookies can be stored. Additionally, major browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are moving away from allowing tracking-related cookies even for first parties.

As the last resort, use pixel tracking if the following are true:

The offer’s advertiser is unable to send server-side conversion notifications.
The offer does not involve mobile app installs.
The offer’s desired end users are on browsers that support tracking-related cookies.

For more information, check out this TUNE support article explaining implementation of pixel tracking.

Postback Tracking

Also known as server-side, server call, server 2 server (or server-to-server), s2s and, mistakenly, server pixel tracking, relies on the advertiser’s servers to track sessions generated on clicks to attribute conversions.  The servers record and then pass the transaction ID back to TUNE. This method is independent of the user’s browser. Postback tracking can be thought of as two separate processes: what happens when a user clicks on an offer and what happens upon conversion.

Leading up to the conversion:

1. User sees an offer.
2. User clicks on the offer.
3. Click goes to a TUNE server. The server records the click, then generates and records the ID for that session (in most cases the transaction ID).
4. TUNE immediately directs the user to the offer’s landing page, including ID for that session in the offer URL.
5. User sees offer’s page on advertiser’s site. Advertiser’s site handles recording that session’s ID however it deems fit, such as storing it as a variable in an e-commerce site or SDK in a mobile app.

When the user converts on that offer:

1. The advertiser’s server sends a signal to TUNE (a.k.a. fires a postback) that includes the ID TUNE initially supplied. The user is not directed back to TUNE in any way.
2. TUNE records the conversion for that session.

TUNE has another great support article explaining postback tracking.

Use postback tracking when:

You have the technical resources available to implement the server-side calls (see below for details on implementation).

Pros and Cons of Pixel Tracking

Pros:

• Pixel tracking is extremely easy to implement. Because it’s just copying and pasting code into the HTML of your website, you don’t need to be a developer to set up tracking. Along the same lines, the learning curve for implementation is not as steep.

Cons:

• Pixel tracking doesn’t work if the conversion occurs on a mobile device. That means conversions on mobile web, in the app stores, and in apps will not register. (Mobile devices and smartphones usually have cookies blocked as a default setting, so a cookie will never be placed on mobile in the first place.)
• Pixel tracking is much more prone to fraud. As you can imagine, because the tracking is done in the browser, it would be fairly easy for a tech-savvy affiliate to fire pixels without an actual conversion occurring.  
• Sometimes, pixels just don’t fire and you won’t know why. A possible reason for this could be that the user cleared their cache between click and conversion, but occasionally the reason is unknown. Reporting will be of little help for troubleshooting, because you won’t have server logs to utilize.
• For all of these reasons (and others), pixel tracking is highly inaccurate.

Pros and Cons of Postback Tracking

Pros:

• Much more reliable because all tracking is done server-side, so you’re leaving a lot less up to chance.
• Much easier to troubleshoot, using TUNE’s server logs.
• Less prone to fraud, and many more options available to mitigate fraud, like adding an offer whitelist, advertiser security token, or hashing the postback URL. Read more about preventing postback fraud.
• You have the option to set up a global postback (on a per advertiser basis), where a single postback implementation can register a conversion for all offers for that advertiser. Pixels don’t have that option.
• In general, postback tracking will allow more options for conversion firing beyond when the user is on the webpage. Instead of being limited to a simple page load, you can have your advertiser send back the conversion URL whenever they please. This will become helpful if your advertiser doesn’t want to register conversions until after an order has shipped, or a lead has been qualified, for example.
• Postback tracking works on mobile devices! Remember, pixel tracking will not work on a smartphone or mobile device.

Cons:

• Postback tracking is harder to implement. It requires direct communication between the network and the advertiser to make sure that the ID is passed into the correct parameter, and then it requires technical implementation on behalf of the advertiser to store and pass back the value. The advertiser will need to have someone with server-side HTTP experience in order to code the requests.
• Implementation time varies widely. Postback tracking could be set up in a matter of minutes, but for some advertisers, it could take an entire day to code the database to store the IDs.

Want more information? Check out our blog series on digital tracking methods, or download the full e-book: How to Become a Track Star: Your Guide to Tracking for Performance Marketing Campaigns.

This article was originally published in 2016 and has been updated with new links and information.

Earnings per click is the be-all end-all performance metric to affiliates.

This key performance metric is your average revenue for each individual click you are driving to an advertiser. And if you don’t think this is the one affiliate marketing metric to keep your eyes on, allow me to explain.

But first, ask yourself a few key questions. Are you studying the metric? Do you know how it is calculated? Are you using it to strategically influence business decisions?

If you answered no to any of the above questions, you are leaving money on the table. And if that isn’t enough to persuade you, let’s cover a few other reasons why this metric matters.

Earnings Per Click Is Your Most Valuable Metric

Earnings per click is an agnostic statistic.

[bctt tweet=”At the end of the day, affiliates want to maximize their profit.” username=”tune”]

The metric doesn’t care how high your conversion rate is. It doesn’t care that exclusive partner payout you may have or the sheer number of clicks you generated. Earnings per click cuts through the clutter and gives you the exact amount of money you can expect to receive for every click you purchase based on historic performance. With that knowledge, it is just up to the affiliate to get their cost per click under their earnings per click to be profitable.

The true potential of the earnings per click metric is fully unlocked when utilized in a paid supply side cost per click or cost per thousand impressions environment. If you can extrapolate a cost per click for every click you drive to your paid advertisements, then you can directly compare this against the earnings per click that is calculated in your tracking software. If you subtract your cost per click from your earnings per click, you get your net profit per click.

(Calculating it looks like this: Net profit per click = earnings per click – cost per click.)

This is key. This is what affiliates thrive on when it comes down to it. Forget conversion rates. Forget click-through rates. Forget payouts. If your earnings per click is higher than your cost per click, you are making money. It’s as simple as that.

Most supply-side advertising platforms will provide you your cost per click, or a way to calculate your cost per click per ad by default. For instance, during my college years, I was operating as a high volume social media affiliate. The self-serve media buying platform I was pushing clicks through offered line-by-line reporting for each of my advertisements and their respective cost per clicks. To harmonize with this, my tracking platform offered earnings per click breakouts by sub ID. This meant that as long as I passed in the creative ID into a sub ID in the tracking links behind my ads, I could directly determine profit for each over any period. Split-testing on easy mode.

How to Calculate Earnings Per Click

Earnings per click is calculated by taking the total earnings you have generated over a period, and then dividing that by the number of clicks you have generated for that same period. This gives you an estimation of what you can expect each individual click you are generating to produce in earnings. This is a figure that is invaluable in a cost per click environment.

(Earnings of an individual click is calculated as total earnings over period “x” over the number of clicks over period “x”.)

3 Tips for Earnings Per Click Campaigns

1. Shop smarter. Let’s say a network approaches you with the same offer you are currently running, but with a higher payout. An attractive offer, right? In reality, this actually means nothing. Sure, the payout is higher — but what if the conversion rate is much lower? You could actually be losing money by running with this new network. This is where earnings per click becomes vitally important. If your EPC is higher on this new network than the old, you are now making more money. The conversion rate doesn’t matter. The payout doesn’t matter.

2. Test quicker. Having one metric to use as a baseline to measure performance makes split-testing a breeze. You now have the ability to juggle multiple networks, or constantly swap out links, while only having to focus on the earnings per click of those campaigns. In such a fluid, fast flowing industry, time is your most valuable asset. Calculating earnings per click gives you back time you were spending performing tedious calculations.

3. Feel safer. Fraud is, and will always be, a nagging, frustrating problem in the performance marketing world.

[bctt tweet=”Monitoring earnings per click as your anchor point facilitates a simple sense of security and control.” username=”tune”]

It is a trivial task to record and chart trends by hour, day, month, when you are only relying on a single key metric that pulls from both your gross spend and earnings. Effortless trend monitoring breeds obvious trend outliers. This empowers you, as a marketer, to focus your time on what’s critically important — performance.

A Final Thought

Running as an affiliate business means spending a lot of time looking for and testing offers. If your main goal is to make as much profit as possible, you need to optimize where you spend your time. Getting lost in numbers and metrics is easy, and if you’re not analyzing the right things, you’re wasting time and losing money.

Focusing on earnings per click may seem like too simple a solution, but it’s a quick way to ensure that you’re making money efficiently.

For more tips, check out TUNE’s Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing.

This article was originally published in August 2016 and has been updated with new information and insights.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

There’s no better time to freak out about a future partner marketing strategy than the present. Don’t sweat. We’re here to help.

In this blog post, we’ll give you the tools you need to ensure that all of your performance partnerships are set up for success.

▢   Set Clear, Achievable Goals

As affiliate marketing continues to grow in popularity, many advertisers have watched their partner marketing programs become their top channel, outpacing even display advertising and paid reviews. The clearer you are on your affiliate KPIs or influencer milestones, the easier it will be to design your partner marketing strategy and measure its success.

Goals to consider include:

• Short-term or long-term: Are you building a partner marketing strategy for an upcoming product launch (a one-off or short-term approach), or for ongoing customer acquisition and sales? Knowing whether your goal lies six months or six years down the road is key.
• Target customer: Who is the ideal customer in your partner program? Are you attempting to get new customers, or re-engage old ones? Are you trying to attract customers away from a competitor, find them from a new source, or improve conversion with an audience you have targeted for a while?
• Specific outcome: What would you like your affiliates and campaigns to produce? Is it new sales, email subscribers, app downloads, or something else altogether?

If you’re brand new to affiliate marketing, this first section may seem overwhelming already. If that’s the case, see our related post, Partner Marketing 101: What Is Affiliate Marketing? for a comprehensive guide on everything you need to know to get ramped up. And if you’re starting your own program, be sure to check out our Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing — it’s a step-by-step guide with everything you need to know to succeed.

▢   Craft the Perfect Partner Portfolio

After determining the goals for your program, begin brainstorming what your ideal partners look like. This will help you align your partner marketing strategies with your goals, and lead to the most effective portfolio for your business.

To find the right partners, first think about the demographics that make up your target audience: where your potential customers shop, what they read, which social media platforms they use, the types of products they buy, whether they are more likely to browse and buy on mobile or on desktop, and so on. Then, take this information and match it to any partners that fit the bill. (Yes, even if that partner is an affiliate named Kim Kardashian, and your budget is so not on her level.)

Once you’ve figured out an affiliate dream team, use their profiles as guidelines for building your perfect portfolio.

Keep in mind that a healthy mix of partners can minimize your potential risk. Don’t want all those eggs in one basket, after all. Consider selecting profiles that vary across social media platforms (Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, etc.) and formats (video, native, blog, display, etc.) to diversify your program.

Even current customers can be part of your portfolio. Referral programs can bring incremental value to your business, but their effectiveness is dependent on the kind of product or service you provide. Also note that the way you interact with and reward your referral program members will differ from your partner marketing program. For a good example, check out Blue Apron or Thrive Market, which incentivize current customers to share referral links to drive new customers in exchange for discounts on future orders.

▢   Determine Payout Structure

Once you decide on your dream portfolio, you’ll want to determine what’s realistic to pay them based on your budget. Kim Kardashian might be your perfect marketing partner, for example, but she’s not going to be affordable for everyone. (And depending on your goals, she may not even be your best option.) So determine early on what kind of payout structure works best for your brand — and for your affiliates.

There are five main types of partner payouts:

1. Cost per Action (CPA): Action essentially means conversion, whatever that may be (sale, download, registration, etc.). This is the most common payout method for offers.
2. Cost per Sale (CPS): This is a set percentage of the total sale of a conversion.
3. Cost per Conversion plus Cost per Sale: With this option, you are setting a flat payout amount as well as specifying a percentage of a sale amount on top of that. This is essentially a combination of the two above payout types.
4. Cost per Click (CPC): Instead of paying out on conversion, you can also set a flat payout on click, and each unique click will receive a payout.
5. Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM): If you are interested in tracking impressions instead of clicks and conversions, this option is set to pay out for every 1,000 impressions.

Payouts can be made a variety of ways as well, from flat rates to dynamically tiered commissions. With the right platform, payouts can be as flexible as you are. 

▢   Create Click-Worthy Content

Once you’ve determined your partner marketing strategy for portfolios and payouts, it’s a good idea to create a content marketing plan. Yes, you can leave it up to influencers and affiliates to promote your brand to their audience in a way they know will resonate. However, usually it’s useful to prepare resources ahead of time. You’ll want to put together content like swipe copy, banner ads, logos, images, and/or videos, depending on your chosen platforms.

You’ll also want to make sure your program looks presentable, reputable, and dependable from the affiliate’s point of view. Try out these 10 tips to find super affiliates to attract the best kinds of partners to your program.

▢   Plan to Keep Affiliates Engaged

Now that you’re prepared for your program, it’s time to go out and connect with your new partners. Some businesses reach out to specific influencers directly, while others turn to specialty affiliate networks to act as a liaison between the two sides of the performance relationship. Other companies leverage current customers as part of a referral program.

If your partner marketing strategy is based around a specific product or promotion, you can create an affiliate marketing calendar to train your partners on how to use your content and set schedules for when to promote it. If your strategy is more ongoing, make it easy for affiliates to find your content in their account or on your website, so they can quickly and regularly share with their networks.

Some brands even find it useful to hire an affiliate manager or an agency to handle their relationships, share new content and promotions, and provide other helpful information or services.

Whatever you decide, here’s an example of how to keep in touch: every month, send out a newsletter to your program that shares upcoming contests, coupons, and promotions. This can help to ensure your partners are always in the know about your brand, and can make it easier for them to come up with new marketing material for their followers.

In addition, chances are high that your partners will have questions about payouts, procedure, technology, and lots of other things. It’s a good idea to have one place for everyone to get everything they need, whether that’s a pure SaaS platform like TUNE, or an exclusive affiliate network, or something else entirely. 

▢   Adopt the Mantra “Measure, Optimize, Repeat”

Once your partner marketing strategy is underway, it’s time to measure performance. Keep track of which affiliates perform best — either by new leads, customers, or both. Also note the platforms, time of day, locations, etc. that deliver the best results. The more you can drill into your performance data to fine-tune your program, the more return you will see for your money.

Remember: Successful partner programs don’t come together overnight. They are the result of a lot of tweaks, failures, and optimizations in content, relationship management, and measurement over time. And you can do this!

Your Best Partner Marketing Strategy Awaits

To learn more about building your best partner marketing strategy yet, download our Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing. Then head on over to the TUNE blog to keep up with the latest news, insights, and advice on performance partnerships.

Questions? Drop us a line. We’re here to help you succeed!

This post was originally published in November 2018 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Editor’s note: With GCP’s region-wide outage on June 29th and the outages it caused for other service providers in our industry, we think it’s worth revisiting this piece on what TUNE does to run highly-stable, fault-tolerant services on the cloud.  The issue that occurred with GCP is something that we’re fully prepared to handle with AWS, and this blog post is an example of that preparation paying off for our customers.  And we haven’t rested on our laurels since this piece was published in 2017 – we’ve been tireless in ensuring that our technology uses every avenue available to stay rock solid, even when the major cloud service providers have issues.

Yesterday saw one of the worst Amazon Web Services (AWS) outages to-date: the S3 service in the us-east-1 AWS region experienced errors for several hours, creating a cascade of errors and outages across the entire AWS ecosystem.  You may have noticed, given the sudden proliferation of Twitter apologies from many of the largest SaaS businesses on the internet.

As many tech companies do, we too make extensive use of S3: for logging, to serve creative, and to be the single source of truth against which we can compare disparate data sets. During an average day, we sync every event TUNE receives to S3 for logging and continuity purposes. We make use of these logged events to replay data, ensure data correctness, and be a critical part of our disaster recovery strategy. Normally we log all of this data to our S3 buckets in, you guessed it, us-east-1. On a normal day, this works great. But what about yesterday?

TUNE weathered the storm.  Because TUNE engineering planned ahead.

As a contingency for this exact scenario, the TUNE engineering team has already split our critical operations over multiple AWS data centers – which is a prerequisite if you truly want your service to be highly available in the modern, distributed internet. That includes creating failover versions of our S3 buckets, reducing a potentially time consuming operation to just a quick configuration change. We also handle any and all failure cases from both S3 and our statistics pipeline by logging and replaying all failures. This keeps our tracking instances safe from any short to medium-term outages in either system, and allows our clients’ offers to keep tracking like nothing happened. Finally, we have the ability to shift traffic from one AWS region to our other tracking regions, with minimal delay.

All of this preparation meant that when S3 failed, we could easily:

• Capture the data that couldn’t be stored, and queue it for replay.
• Shift our traffic to our other data centers.

-and-

• Redirect our services to S3 in another region.

This all allowed us to keep our links tracking and conversions rolling in, despite the ongoing outage.

Is there room for improvement here? Of course – we’re never satisfied. We’ll be working on our alerting, automated responses, and deploy procedures over the coming weeks to make a failover of this magnitude more seamless.  We’re also already in the process of improving how we enforce caps to make them more resilient in the face of issues like these.

We’re delighted that the foresight and hard work of our engineers paid off, and we’re sure the more than 250 million clicks we tracked and reported on during the outage have our clients feeling that way too.

Folks, I am no stranger to performance marketing. I have logged over 20 years in this beloved channel, and I have participated in every nook and cranny of the affiliate marketing ecosystem. With the insight I gathered leading a top-tier affiliate network, driving a global advertiser program at scale, and now evangelizing technology on the platform side at TUNE, I can say with confidence: When partnership strategy meets program structure, something magical happens. 

Earlier this year, we launched TUNE’s brand of partner marketing and a new vision for marketing partnerships. Our stated mission is crystal clear: Enable marketers to do more with their existing relationships, while empowering them to build more high-quality partnerships. Simplify marketers’ end-to-end partner management tasks, while helping them eliminate the risk of fraud and compliance issues. Make that magic a reality.

Since that announcement, we have launched a number of key product capabilities to back our vision. If you are considering changing your solution for performance partnerships, now is the time to add the TUNE Partner Marketing Platform to your list. I’m beyond excited to share why.  

Move TUNE to the Top of Your Shortlist

In TUNE’s recent e-book, we discuss the key aspects of driving partner program success. Not surprisingly, two key relationship drivers top the list: being attuned to your partners’ specific needs and delivering on them. Problem is, most of the promises made to partners — fair and timely payment for efforts, attribution regardless of the channel, partner trust — rely heavily on true technology solutions to fill in the gaps. 

Yet to date, there have been few true technology-based solutions available to performance and partner marketers. Most solutions that claim to be platforms are really networks in disguise. They hit you up on performance fees and build a marketplace of partnerships thanks to your hard work. And as networks, they tend to compete with your other networks. The ecosystem has yet to experience a platform that is: 

1. a true technology platform that helps advertisers, networks, and partners connect flexibly and work collaboratively across mobile and web;
2. a technology solution that protects your proprietary relationships from easy replication with your competition; and
3. a SaaS-based solution that does not require a Ph.D. and/or a forklift to administer. 

That is all about to change. Today, TUNE becomes a viable alternative in the partner marketing space as the only SaaS platform that empowers you to partner the way you want to via features that support every step of the partner marketing lifecycle:

Pay Your Way

At the heart of any enduring business partnership is trust and predictability; motivating the right behaviors with the right rewards is core to building this trust. This year we released two enhanced capabilities in the TUNE Partner Marketing Platform for advertisers and networks to leverage for this purpose.

Payout Structures

To improve the performance of a program, specifically with regards to growth and profitability, you need to elicit the right publisher behaviors. To create true success for the brand, these behaviors must align with your financial objectives. TUNE’s new payout structures are purpose-built with these goals in mind. With our advanced commissioning tools, you can:

• Customize your partner rewards – Invent new ways to get the most out of your partners.
• Reduce complexity and increase efficiency – Build incentive structures simply and comprehensively.
• Optimize the payout – Flexibly adjust incentives to generate the right outcomes.

TUNE Pay

TUNE Pay pairs powerfully integrated accounts payable workflows with international payment processing to help you pay partners the way you want to. With TUNE Pay, you can free up your busy schedule to spend more time building deeper partnerships and less time balancing your checkbook:

• Pay partners flexibly – Pay through TransferWise and PayPal. Customize approvals, payment periods, currencies, and methods.
• Bank the time and cost savings – Replace manual reconciliation and verification workflows with a seamlessly integrated payment solution. Save on the lowest payment fees on the market.
• Reduce financial exposure – Improve cash flow by reducing clawbacks and payouts related to fraud.

Capture Every Conversion

Apple has declared war on user ad tracking, and Mozilla and Google are fast-following with similar vigor. With Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.2 (ITP) for the Safari web browser, Apple has effectively disabled most of the mechanisms through which advertisers connect the dots on the users they’ve engaged with.  

With the advent of this protocol, web and mobile web tracking methods that depend on cookies are becoming virtual black holes of attribution. TUNE’s solution to this growing challenge is built upon years of experience working in the mobile world, and we believe it’s exactly what is needed to help modern marketers adjust to this new reality. 

ITP 2.2-Compliant Cookieless Tracking

TUNE’s cookieless tracking solution eliminates attribution risk for your company and your partners. Build your tracking infrastructure on a mobile-friendly standard that supports all mobile browsers and social channels. Implement TUNE’s lightweight solution and eliminate “leakage” from mobile web and social channels to promote your business. Win over mobile partners with a tracking method that builds confidence and helps you:  

• Give credit where credit is due – Ensure partners are rewarded for the results they deliver across mobile, mobile web, and desktop.
• Simplify the setup process – Implement tracking across all channels in a few easy steps.
• Make mobile tracking work, always – Track all events using the standard that powers most mobile attribution today.

Activate Mobile Partners

If you are a brand with a mobile app, chances are someone in your organization has been measuring mobile outcomes (e.g., cost-per-install, cost-per-post-install event) via mobile measurement partners (MMPs) for years. So how can you take those insights on mobile partnerships and optimize the results along with your traditional partnerships? By leveraging your existing infrastructure, you have everything you need to activate the mobile partnership channel and incorporate performance marketing into your apps. TUNE’s tight integrations with MMPs enable this capability for you with minimal effort.

Native Mobile Measurement Integrations

• Unlock mobile partnerships now – Use our turnkey integration with five of the top mobile measurement partners to have the right tracking, right away.  
• No additional SDK needed – Integrate using the measurement SDK already in your app to do the work. No developers required.
• Experience mobile seamlessly – Improve conversion rates by leveraging technology that optimizes the mobile user experience.

Build the Trust

Fraud likes to hide in plain sight. And it’s especially hard to see it when your program is in motion. In partner marketing programs, beyond transactional fraud, attribution fraud is the most common type. Fraudsters like to claim credit for driving results that are not rightfully theirs. This behavior creates difficulties for brands in deciphering which traffic sources are valuable and truly incremental. The TUNE Partner Marketing Platform has recently released two key solutions to help you traverse the fraud landscape.

Proactive Fraud Prevention

Automatically detect and reject fraudulent activity with Proactive Fraud Prevention from TUNE, the only partner marketing platform with automatic fraud protection built in. This free technology combines revolutionary automation capabilities from TUNE with premier ad fraud detection from Fraudlogix to provide brands the most powerful protection in the industry:

• Play offense, not defense – Let your platform work with you and for you.
• Manage it all on one platform – Fraudlogix data is built right in — no moving parts.
• Invest in the right relationships – Choose the partners that best align with your goals.
  

Time-to-Action Report

Without a baseline of what is “normal,” it is difficult to tell fact from fiction. And without clarity, it is hard to take proper action. TUNE’s Time-to-Action Report measures the lag time between the action and the attributed event to enable you to:  

• Vet all of your traffic – Easily identify outliers in your program to investigate.
• Eliminate fraudulent ad spend – Improve ROI on your overall traffic mix.
• Back up decisions with granular data – Make decisions with clarity and confidence.

Ready to Hear More?

We’re excited to share everything we have planned for the future in addition to everything we’ve released this year. Visit tune.com/get-started or contact partnermarketing@tune.com for more.

Photo by Philipp Katzenberger on Unsplash

As part of our commitment to empowering marketers to Do More With Less, Worry Free, the teams at TUNE are always looking for ways to empower our customers. One way we do that is by providing access to every single feature and function in our platform via API. (And with over 650 API endpoints, that’s saying something.) In this post, team member Alon Bresky describes how our API is structured and how it can be used to develop any solution our customers can think of.

An API, or application programming interface, is a piece of software that allows two different applications to communicate (or interface) with each other. As a defining feature of our platform, the TUNE API is a powerful tool for affiliate networks and programs looking to differentiate their businesses and empower their partners. In this post, I’ll outline how our platform and our APIs make that possible.

Meet the Industry’s Most Powerful API

The TUNE API is known in the affiliate marketing industry as the most advanced and flexible API available. It provides access to every single feature and function that can be found in the TUNE platform. As such, it opens a world of rich possibilities for our customers, from personalizing and enhancing current features to creating virtually any custom tool or workflow. Our customers even use it to build their own web interfaces, where only the ad server functionality is managed by TUNE and the interface is fully maintained by the customer.

One of the big factors behind the success of the TUNE API is the fact that it is divided into four specialized types: a Network API, an Affiliate API, an Advertiser API, and an Integrator API. This gives the flexibility to integrate with TUNE’s platform via API not only to network owners, but also to their affiliates, advertisers, and third-party service providers.

Let’s break each of them down.

Network API

The Network API provides read/write access to any data available in the platform. As such, it is mostly used by network and program owners to develop custom functionality for their TUNE platform instance. With the Network API, customers can build custom reports and tools in the web interface, integrate with any CRM or third-party platform, import and export data in every possible format, automate time-consuming tasks, and much more.

For more examples of what can be achieved through the Network API and customer use cases, see our articles on leveraging our API integrations and how to use the our APIs for your secret sauce, or contact the Solutions Engineering team for a technical consultation.

Affiliate API

The Affiliate API provides network affiliates read-only access to their data within TUNE. The main way our customers use the Affiliate API is to automate the process of integration between networks, giving affiliates direct access to their TUNE account outside of the platform. This lets affiliates quickly and easily accomplish essential tasks, such as downloading offers from an advertiser’s network, or pulling click and conversion data for use in their own business intelligence tools.

Advertiser API

The Advertiser API is similar to the Affiliate API, but limits access to advertiser-specific information. This API lets advertisers process and pull important statistics on their ad campaigns, network performance, detailed and aggregated cost data, and more.

Integrator API

The Integrator API allows technology providers that are integrated with the TUNE platform to manage data on behalf of TUNE customers who use their integrations. While the Integrator API expands on functionality found in the Network API, it also wraps endpoints in an OAuth2-powered authentication and authorization layer. This layer limits access by network ID and API endpoint (controller and method), does not require full customer account access, and does not consume customer account API rate limits.

These enhancements and others in the Integrator API benefit TUNE customers, their technology providers, and their mutual clients by providing stronger data security, better platform stability and flexibility, and a shorter time to market.

“We know that data security is one of the most sensitive questions for networks. It was very important for our customers to have better control on how we access their data. With the new HasOffers Integrator API, our customers are able to choose if we have read-only or read-write access to their HasOffers instance, and can even specify any custom scope of API methods that should be allowed. This level of flexibility is a huge win for both us and our clients.”
– TUNE Technology Provider

System-to-System Integrations

Since TUNE APIs provide infinite possibilities to develop custom solutions and add-ons for the platform, many third-party companies have already built products using our APIs and offer these solutions to TUNE customers. Here are some of the most popular use cases:

Fraud Prevention

One fraud solution integrated with TUNE is 24metrics, which provides customizable fraud detection with transparent decision tracking that detects IP duplication, VPNs, proxies, emulators, bots, click spam, and more. 24metrics uses the Network API to access real-time data from network accounts. It accesses all conversions tracked, analyzes them, and then via API rejects fraudulent conversions and blocks traffic from suspicious affiliates. Thanks to the Network API providing powerful read/write access to the data, companies like 24metrics can monitor traffic in real time to actively prevent fraud traffic.

Third-Party Platform Integrations

One of the most popular solutions for TUNE customers is the system-to-system platform integration. These integrations are easy to perform via automated scripts, which download data such as offers, affiliates, conversions, and more from one network and import it into a second network. In this case, either the Network API or the Affiliate API can be used — it depends on the scenario. The benefit of using an API for this process is that it can fully automate the integration to keep data between networks synchronized at all times, which can prevent traffic loss and other costly technical issues.

Other Custom Solutions

Many other third-party platforms are also using API functionality to download offers, reports, and other data to build custom reporting visualizations and dashboards, analyze performance, and even make changes according to proprietary algorithms. Here are only a few examples of the third-party service providers who integrate with TUNE via our API:

Axonite: A network management hub that integrates data, optimizes, automates, and coordinates operations across multiple disparate systems and channels. Axonite uses the Network API to pull offers, conversions, and stats to analyze the data and optimize network performance.

TrackingDesk: A traffic and conversions tracking platform for media buyers, affiliates, and marketers that provides one simple dashboard to manage all campaigns. TrackingDesk uses the Network API to get all conversions and stats data and to optimize campaigns among multiple networks.

AnApps: A tracking link verification service. AnApps uses the Affiliate API to automatically download offers and verify the redirect paths of multiple tracking links at once.

In Closing

The TUNE API opens a world of possibilities for making the jobs of networks, advertisers, partner program managers, and more easier. With TUNE’s platform and API functionality, our customers and their partners can develop any possible solution they can think of.

If you’re interested in working with one of our integrated technology partners or developing your own solutions using the TUNE API, get in touch with our team. Questions? Let us know in the comments below.

For more articles by Solutions Engineering team members, check out:
     •  Why We Moved to Serverless Computing to Deploy Custom Builds
     •  How to Use the TUNE API for Your Secret Sauce
     •  How the TUNE Solutions Engineering Team Makes Platform Migrations Easy

I’m proud of everything we release here at TUNE, but this one is special. Today, I’m excited to introduce Proactive Fraud Prevention, TUNE’s new fraud fighting tool that builds robust fraud detection right into our partner marketing platform. TUNE customers can now get a complete understanding on the quality of their traffic, and take automated action to reduce their exposure to ad fraud.

What We’ve Learned About Fraud

Estimated by Forrester Research to reach $10.9 billion in wasted spend by 2021, advertising fraud has been a constant challenge for the performance marketing industry. It is an issue that plagues advertisers and networks alike. And it is a problem that hurts all TUNE customers: our networks lose business from it, and can often feel powerless to police it; our advertiser customers see themselves paying for bad traffic, and lose faith in their partnership programs. Fraud breaks down two pillars the entire partner marketing ecosystem is dependent on, trust and transparency – two outcomes that are achievable only with the right tools and technology.

Identifying and preventing ad fraud is not new to TUNE. As we’ve pioneered tools through the years to address mobile app install (CPI) fraud, we’ve learned a couple things:

• Everyone wants PROACTIVE versus REACTIVE solutions.
  The distinction is in how much work you need to do to enforce traffic quality and control.  Nobody wants to do all of the enforcement on their own, whether it’s having to inspect reporting to find bad partners, or having to set up filtering rules and thresholds. They would rather the tooling just solve the problem for them. They expect more from the system.
• Everyone needs to see the FINANCIAL BENEFIT of the fraud tooling.
  Proactive or reactive, you need to understand that the fraud tooling is working. It’s nice when it silently filters out traffic, but the net effect is like vacuuming the carpet without being able to see the dust in the bag when you’re done – unsatisfying at best. Users need to know who the fraud outliers are in their partnerships. They need to quickly find and clearly see the bad actors who are providing poor-quality traffic, so that anyone who views a fraud report can instantly determine who is off — and have the numbers to back it up.

Staying Ahead of Fraud

To solve these pain points, we built the power of Fraudlogix – the premier ad fraud detection database – right into the TUNE Partner Marketing Platform, providing TUNE customers with the most powerful fraud protection in the industry. By pairing the power of Fraudlogix with TUNE’s revolutionary automation capabilities, customers can now automatically detect and reject fraudulent traffic to safeguard the quality of their program and ensure that all partners operate on the same basis of trust.

With Proactive Fraud Prevention, TUNE customers can stress less knowing their traffic is being monitored and protected, 24/7/365.

Proactive Fraud Prevention automatically detects and rejects fake clicks and bad traffic from:

• Known malware and bots
• Non-human scripts
• Known compromised sources
• Spoofed traffic
• Anonymous proxies

Customers can easily see the financial significance of proactive fraud prevention with a new report in TUNE’s comprehensive reporting suite. TUNE will also continue to track and report on rejected impressions and clicks to allow customers to analyze high- and low-performing partners and sources. This service will be provided free of charge for all TUNE customers.

“Proactive Fraud Prevention helps our customers shift from playing defense to offense. With Fraudlogix baked right into the platform, there are no moving parts. This allows our customers to choose the partners that best align with their goals and invest deeper in the right relationships,” said Peter Hamilton, CEO of TUNE.

“We’re excited to be partnering with TUNE on this modern approach to fighting fraud,” said Hagai Shechter, CEO of Fraudlogix. “TUNE’s customers depend on the platform to help them fight fraud and the data we are providing enables them to block fraudulent actions before they affect campaigns. This saves TUNE’s customers time and has real implications on ROI.”

Proactive Fraud Prevention and the new Traffic Fraud Report will be available to all TUNE customers by April 2019. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out to your customer success manager with any questions, or email sales@tune.com to learn more.

About TUNE

TUNE builds technology that powers successful marketing partnerships across mobile and web. The TUNE Partner Marketing Platform is the industry’s most flexible SaaS platform for building, managing, and growing partner programs and networks. Headquartered in Seattle with hundreds of employees worldwide, TUNE is trusted by innovative affiliate marketers, the largest performance advertising networks, and iconic brands across the globe. For more information visit: www.tune.com.

About Fraudlogix

Fraudlogix is an online advertising fraud detection company founded in 2010 by industry veterans with a deep understanding of the digital ad ecosystem. It specializes in ad fraud solutions for desktop, mobile, in-app and video environments for the programmatic and affiliate spaces. Today, Fraudlogix monitors data from over 640 million unique users, 300+ million URLs, and 1.2 billion unique devices monthly. Visit www.fraudlogix.com for more information.

Once again, TUNE has completed a successful audit of its service organization controls, receiving a positive SOC 2 Type II report.  In following through on its commitment to provide trustworthy and transparent solutions, TUNE continues to give clients, vendors, and employees peace of mind that they can do business with TUNE worry-free.

Use of an independent third-party audit to review privacy, security, and reporting controls is an investment that companies do not take lightly.  The process tests the sufficiency of a company’s procedures and execution on a variety of systems.  It also requires active employee engagement across a broad swath of a company.  

In pursuing the more stringent and comprehensive SOC 2 Type II certification (rather than a Type I), TUNE chose to test its policies and procedures over a lengthy time period rather than a single moment in time.  The audit period for TUNE’s report extended for more than a year, from mid-July 2017 through the end of August 2018, demonstrating an ongoing effort to uphold the Trust Services Principles.

TUNE views the feedback loop generated from annual third-party reviews — including active dialogue with auditors — as the best means to improve forward-looking operations, rather than an historical artifact or checked box on a compliance questionnaire.  TUNE completed its first SOC 2 Type II audit in fall of 2017, and intends to sustain its investments in a customer-centric security program.

To learn more about how TUNE approaches data security and privacy, click here.  The SOC 2 Type II report is available upon request to security@tune.com for TUNE clients and prospects under a non-disclosure commitment.

Robbie and Rachel chat during exhibition hours in the main hall of Affiliate Summit West 2019.

Another Affiliate Summit in the books, and our HasOffers Team came back with tons of industry insights. What might those be, you may ask? Here is a quick recap of what we learned at #ASW19:

1. Learning the Lingo: “Partnerships” Is the New “Affiliate Program”

Throughout countless meetings at the conference, our team picked up on this phrase that people commonly used to refer to their affiliates/publishers/sources: partner(ship).

“A partnership suggests a symbiotic relationship in which both parties have a vested interest in. It implies that advertisers and publishers can only coexist through a healthy marriage of complementary business goals.”  – Derrick, Credit Sesame

It’s not to say that the word affiliate has made its exit entirely, but keeping your tracking platform fresh is just as important as keeping up with the lingo associated.

2. Influencer Marketing Is Evolving, and Quickly

While advertisers love working with well-known talent, it’s not clear what true measurement traditional influencer marketing can provide. Typically, an influencer will receive an upfront payment to post to their blog, social account, et cetera, and then it’s a “see what sticks” experiment from there. But what about the smaller brand advocates, or micro-influencers, who want a piece of the pie?

We’re seeing more and more advertisers expanding their coverage to include these micro-influencers, and moreover, switching to a Cost-Per-Action model where their partners now have to earn their commission based on measurement.

“It’s important to know the ROI of our marketing dollars, and HasOffers definitely allows for us to both manage and measure the success of our efforts.”  – Leonard, BioTrust Nutrition

From there, these partners are then rewarded for proven campaign success.

Customers and prospects alike told us they loved the HasOffers booth this year — especially the comfy couches.

3. TUNE Has the Best Customers!

Getting to meet with those who have been power users of HasOffers for years was a true pleasure (as always). It’s great to hear that our product is able to solve for even the most unique use case, and because of our platform, customers can do more, with less, worry free.

“We love HasOffers — we’ve been with you guys forever and I love that your product team is taking our feedback and making things happen!”  – Charles, Commission Depot

It was really collaborating with our clients on the spot, and the entire conference erupted with excitement for what TUNE has in store for 2019. And of course, it’s always fun to talk shop over a few rounds of Topgolf.

4. We Have the Solution You’re Looking For

Whether you’ve been in the affiliate marketing space for decades or are just getting started, HasOffers can help make your day-to-day more efficient. Our tracking software becomes more robust by the day, and we would love to demonstrate how it can help you achieve all of your business goals. Have questions? Please feel free to reach out to us to schedule a demo, or sign up for a free trial today!

We have exciting news to share today straight from Affiliate Summit West: Performance Automation is now available in the TUNE platform, and it’s about to change the way marketers get maximum performance out of their networks.

The new Performance Automation features enable partner networks and advertisers to save time while increasing their bottom line with smart optimization tools that automatically maximize profits and minimize costs. These features are integrated directly into TUNE and are available free of charge to all Enterprise customers.

“Our Performance Automation features deliver on our promise to reduce time spent on repetitive and manual tasks, so your team can focus on the things that matter the most — your best relationships,” said Dan Koch, Chief Technology Officer at TUNE. “With our new automation capabilities, TUNE will automatically spot low-performing, low-value, low-profitability traffic and take action on it, 24/7, so you can spend less time mired in spreadsheets and more time finding relationships that actually grow your business.”

TUNE Performance Automation functionality focuses around four core areas:

1. Profit Optimization, which maximizes ROI by ensuring campaigns run only profitable offers.
2. Conversion Rate Optimization, which protects against fraud and minimizes traffic costs by optimizing traffic quality.
3. Alerts and Actions, which immediately notify and warn/block offers, affiliates, and advertisers according to pre-selected settings.
4. Event Logs, which record and provide real-time visibility into every automated action taken.

To automatically optimize campaigns, marketers simply select the desired optimization settings and thresholds, and the TUNE platform does the rest. Performance automation rules run 24/7 to analyze performance statistics and automatically take action to optimize campaigns and notify the appropriate parties.

In addition to this functionality, the development team is already working on enhancements and new capabilities that will take performance automation on the TUNE platform even further.

“TUNE is dedicated to driving the future of performance optimization — for us, that means creating technology that empowers our customers to drive more value with their time,” said Koch. “We’ve been working closely with customers to integrate the core automation and optimization capabilities they need directly into the TUNE platform, while building a technical framework that will allow us to be more agile as we continue to innovate beyond the tools you see in the industry today.”

For more information on performance automation, including use cases and feature details, see “The TUNE Guide to Performance Marketing Automation.” If you have questions or would like to learn more about the TUNE platform and automation features, please email sales@tune.com.

Photo by Daniil Vnoutchkov on Unsplash

It’s almost that time of year again, folks. No, we’re not talking about the holidays  — we’re talking about Affiliate Summit West. As the performance marketing industry’s premier global event, #ASW19 will welcome more than 6,000 digital marketers to Las Vegas this January. We’re excited to be sending TUNE back to the Strip with 13 experts from across the organization, from sales to product development, who have some exciting news to share.

Here’s a quick look at what you can expect from TUNE at #ASW19.

Get the Inside Scoop at Booth #519

The HasOffers by TUNE roadmap for 2019 is packed with plenty of platform updates, including brand new features, improved interface designs, and enhanced reporting capabilities. But we think attendees will be particularly interested in our news about auto-optimization … which is all we can say about it until #ASW19. We’ll also be talking about pressing issues like ITP 2.0 and fraud, hot performance marketing topics for 2019, and tips on how to do more, with less, worry free on TUNE.

To hear the details in person, schedule a meeting with our team, or just pop by booth #519 in the Exhibit Hall to chat.

We’ll also be giving away a new Sonos One smart speaker. Stop by our booth to enter for your chance to win! (As usual, we’ll have plenty of TUNE swag to hand out, too.)  

Meet Up at the Meet Market

If you can’t make it to our booth, be sure to catch us in the Meet Market at table #B13. It’s an experience you won’t want to miss. TUNE CEO Peter Hamilton put it best:

This is one of the most valuable face-to-face networking sessions you will experience at Affiliate Summit. Booths are small, close together, and palms are being pressed faster than any expo floor you’ve ever seen. We have always seen a huge return from both participating in the Meet Market and attending, so don’t miss it.

Tee Off at TopGolf

Join HasOffers by TUNE and Fluent as we take over the fourth floor of TopGolf Las Vegas for a night of networking on the virtual green. Enjoy stunning views of the city while sipping cocktails and mingling with customers and prospects, or challenge guests to an interactive game of skill. Space is limited and filling up quickly, so please RSVP soon thanks for registering to join us!

Who’s Coming From TUNE?

We’ll have 13 people from across the organization at #ASW19:

• Peter Hamilton, CEO
• Nate Ivie, Sales
• Brett Olson, Sales
• Connor Silva, Sales
• Nessa Voigt, Sales
• Robbie Schab, Sales
• TJ Spero, Customer Success
• Rachel Sanchez, Customer Success
• Alex Dent, Innovation
• Bhavana Mathur, Product
• Matt Jahn, Product
• Liz Busse, Product
• Hillary Robinson, Operations
  

See You at #ASW19

Affiliate Summit West 2019 is just around the corner. Here at TUNE, we’re finalizing plans and looking forward to meeting up and talking performance marketing, TUNE, and the next big thing. Hope to see you there!

Meet TUNE at #ASW19

Table #B13 | Meet Market Open Hours: Sunday, Jan. 6th, Noon-6pm

Booth #519 | Exhibit Hall Open Hours: Monday, Jan. 7th, 10am-5pm; Tuesday, Jan. 8th, 10am-4pm

American Well is a telehealth company that helps customers easily access doctors online. Tim Ming, the director of digital marketing at American Well leads the growth team for a number of insurance companies and hospital systems. Working with clients in a privacy- and security-centric industry, it’s important American Well consistently delivers transparent, full-funnel results and can count on technical expertise from TUNE’s customer success team.

Watch the full video below to learn how American Well uses HasOffers by TUNE to successfully help their clients grow while keeping their data safe.

Interested in learning how other companies are using the HasOffers platform? Hear from Chen Shalit, the director of business development at DAU-UP who gets perfect results for their clients with HasOffers.