Affiliate tracking software
Affiliate tracking, from the buyer’s side of the deal.
The phrase means two different things. If you run an affiliate programme, you need software that pays your affiliates. If you buy traffic and send it to offers, you need software that tells you which traffic paid. This page is about the second.
As a media buyer you are paid by a network, in arrears, on numbers you cannot see being counted. Your job is to know — before the network tells you — which zone, creative and country are worth more than they cost. That means holding your own record of every click and matching it to every payout.
The join is the click id. Your tracking link issues one, passes it to the network in whatever parameter that network expects, and the network hands it back in a postback when the sale is approved. If either half is wrong, the sale arrives attached to nothing, and you are optimising on noise.
The second thing that separates real numbers from hopeful ones is conversion status. A network reporting a sale is not a network that has paid for it. Approved, pending and rejected have to be different numbers all the way through, or your ROI includes money you will never see.
How it works
The mechanism, not the marketing.
- 01
Your link tags the click
It issues an id and passes the network its own macros, so both sides can name the same visitor later.
- 02
The network stores it
Whatever field it uses — sub id, click id, external id — the id travels with the visitor to the offer.
- 03
The postback comes back
On a sale, the network calls your URL with the id, the payout and a status.
- 04
The status changes later
Pending becomes approved or rejected days afterwards. Good tracking updates the same conversion rather than adding another.
What to check tonight
You can do all of this without us.
None of it needs an account anywhere. If it turns out your tracking is fine, you have lost twenty minutes and learned something.
Send yourself a test conversion
Most networks have a test postback button. Fire one and confirm it lands on the right click, with the right payout, and shows as pending rather than revenue.
Check your macros are being filled
Look at yesterday’s clicks for a token that arrived as literal text — a raw macro name in your report means that column is empty and your zone-level decisions are guesses.
Compare approved against reported
Pull your network’s approved payouts for last month and compare them to what your tracker calls revenue. A gap is either missing postbacks or counted-too-early conversions, and both are fixable.
Find out what your bot rate is
If you cannot answer that question for one campaign, you cannot argue about an invoice. Traffic from data centres and headless browsers is the cheapest kind for a network to sell.
How UTMCAP does it
What you would get here.
39 networks already mapped
Parameters, statuses and the shared secret per network, so a postback works the first time.
Late conversions still land
A postback finds its click whenever it arrives, and a status revision updates the conversion instead of duplicating it.
Approved, pending, rejected
Three separate figures on every report, with only approved counted as money.
Filtered clicks keep their reason
In words, per click — which is what you send a network when you dispute what they billed.
One visitor is one click
A funnel with a lander costs the same as one without, and conversions are never billable.
Conversions back to the platform
Google, Microsoft, Meta and TikTok get the sale within seconds, matched on their own click id.
Questions
The ones people ask next.
Read next
- Can I use this to run my own affiliate programme?
- Not really. UTMCAP is built for the buyer: it tracks what you spend and what came back. It does not manage affiliates, calculate their commissions or pay them.
- What if my network does not support postbacks?
- Some do not — CJ Affiliate is the well-known one. You can still track clicks and cost; what you lose is automatic revenue. Importing a payout export is the usual workaround.
- Do rejected conversions count against my plan?
- No. Conversions are not billable here at all, whatever their status. Only the click the redirect answered is.
Point a domain at us and run a click through it.
The free plan takes a hundred thousand clicks a month and no card. If it does not do what you need, you have lost twenty minutes.