What UTMCAP does

UTMCAP records where a click came from, where it went, and whether it turned into money — across ad platforms that let you redirect and ones that do not.

A tracker answers one question: for every click you paid for, what happened next?

That sounds simple until the click leaves your control. It lands on a page you host, presses a button that leads somewhere else, and converts on a third party's server minutes or days later. Nothing in that chain knows about the others unless something threads them together.

UTMCAP is that thread. It issues an id at the moment of the click, keeps it through the landing page, carries it to the offer, and matches it back when the conversion is reported.

#How a click travels

Visitor       clicks an ad
Edge/origin   matches the campaign, runs its paths
Redirect      issues the click id, 302s onward
Lander        the tag keeps the id, rewrites the call to action
/out/         resolves the parked hop to the offer
Postback      the network reports the conversion back

Not every campaign uses every hop. Google Search will not let you redirect at all — see parallel tracking — so there the ad points straight at your page and the tag opens the click instead. A store campaign has no second hop, because the visitor buys on the page they landed on.

#Where things live

Clicks, conversions and page views are in ClickHouse. That is the history you make decisions from.
Campaigns, offers, landing pages, sources and domains are in Postgres. That is the configuration.
Caches, flood guards and the lander hop that /out/ resolves are in Redis.

You never touch any of them directly, but knowing which is which explains why some numbers update instantly and others are computed over a range.

#What to read next

If you are setting up for the first time, start with your first campaign. If you already have one and something is not working, troubleshooting is organised by symptom.

#The whole of it

Setting up — traffic sources and the macros that decide whether your sub-ids and your cost are real, affiliate networks, offers and landing pages, campaigns and flows, and your own tracking domain.

Tracking — the tag, tracking URLs, parallel tracking for the platforms that refuse a redirect, the call to action, and every token you can put in a URL.

Measuring — postbacks from a network, and goals on a page you own.

Reporting — the figures, exactly, the four screens that summarise, the logs for when a total will not say why, and how a visitor was identified.

Protecting a campaign — bot detection, and hiding a landing page from people it is not for.

Tools — smartlinks, the data corrector for backfilling what a broken postback never delivered, and integrations and geo databases.

Your account — team and settings.