Offers and landing pages

The two destinations a flow can route to. An offer is where the money is; a landing page is a step before it.

#Offers

An offer is a URL the network gave you, plus what it pays.

The URL must carry {click_id}. It is the only way the network knows which click to name when it reports the conversion back. An offer URL without it produces conversions that cannot attribute to anything, and there is no fixing them afterwards.

https://network.example/offer/123?aff_sub={click_id}

The parameter name is theirs — aff_sub, s1, subid, whatever their documentation says. The {click_id} part is ours. See tokens for everything else that can go in an offer URL.

Payout is what one conversion pays.

Payout source decides which figure wins when both exist. Left on — the default — the network's own amount is preferred whenever its postback carries one, because that is the network telling you what it actually paid. Turn it off to always use the payout configured here, which is right when a network reports a gross figure and you are paid a share of it.

Either way, a network that fires a bare notification — no amount, just "this converted" — records the offer's payout rather than zero. That case used to be stored as worth nothing, and the revenue was simply missing from every report with nothing to say it had gone.

Conversion cap is a daily limit: approved conversions per UTC day before the offer stops taking traffic. Note the day boundary is UTC, not your local time, so a cap appears to reset mid-evening or mid-morning depending on where you are. Worth setting on a capped offer, because a network that has stopped paying does not stop accepting traffic.

Each offer carries its own performance: Clicks, Conv., CR, Revenue, Cost, Profit, ROI, EPC, CPC, CPA — computed as in the figures, exactly.

#Landing pages

A landing page is a page you host, between the ad and the offer.

The URL saved here must be the address a visitor actually reaches. This is the field that quietly breaks things. The tag sends the page's own address and UTMCAP matches it against your registered landing pages; a trailing slash that is or is not there, a www that is or is not there, or a staging address saved instead of the live one will each prevent a match.

An unmatched page means no click id, which means the call to action never fills and the button does nothing. It is the first thing to check when a button is dead.

Click slots are how many separately-reported buttons the page has. Give each #utmcap link a data-utmcap-slot and the reports break click-outs down by it — hero versus footer, which is one of the cheapest tests available.

#Its own figures

Landing pages report Visits and LP clicks as separate columns, and the distinction is the whole point: visits are arrivals, LP clicks are the people who pressed through. LP CTR between them is how well the page does its one job.

#Organic routed by

A column naming which campaign routes an organic visitor to this page, and it only matters when more than one campaign shares the page. See when two campaigns share a lander.

#Groups

Both offers and landing pages take a Group, and so do networks. It is a label for filtering, and it earns its place around thirty of anything — before that it is one more field to fill in, after that it is the difference between a list you can use and one you scroll.

#Which to use

A campaign does not need a landing page. Sending clicks straight to the offer is fewer moving parts, and it is right when the offer's own page does the selling.

A landing page is worth its complexity when it pre-sells, when it qualifies, or when the offer's page is one you cannot change but the traffic needs warming first. Use one and you gain LP CTR as a number to work on — and you take on the tag, the call to action, and one more place a URL can be wrong.