Introduction To A Campaign Flow

This introduction will help explain how traffic flows into and out of ThriveTracker and how everything is linked together.

Main Components:

• Landing Page 
• Offer
• Traffic Source
• Campaign 

Let's take a minute to distinguish the difference between each of the above.

A landing page is an optional page that you can add into Thrive. This is a page provided by you that you may want to send visitors to before they reach the actual offer (e.g. Presell or Advertorial pages).

An offer is the actual page that contains the product or service that you are taking visitors to. Offers are often times provided to you by an affiliate network or from a direct advertiser. Affiliate networks link advertisers (those who have the product or service) with affiliates who can drive traffic to their offer (you). You receive a payout from the affiliate network/advertiser for every conversion made on the offer (tracked as revenue in Thrive).

The traffic source is where you are getting your visitors from. This could be from search engine traffic, social media, ad networks, among many others. Normally, this traffic is bought and would be your 'cost' amount in Thrive (what you are paying the source per click).

A campaign is what gathers all of this information and links it together. You assign each campaign to a single traffic source and have a grouping of lander(s) and offer(s) in each campaign. Each campaign has a unique URL (and landing page pixel if you prefer to track without a redirect) that you provide your traffic source with in order to redirect visitors through Thrive, and allow you to track with us.

Why use a tracking platform like Thrive? We help you manage all of your different traffic sources, landing pages, and offers in a single platform. This helps you better optimize all of your campaigns.

Flow:

Traffic Source --> Campaign URL --> Landing Page (optional) --> Landing Page Code (Click Through Link) --> Offer

 The visitors from your traffic source will click through your ad for example, and will be redirected through Thrive's campaign URL (generating a click in Thrive). They will then be taken to either your landing page and then to the actual offer, or they may go directly from the ad to the offer if you don't have a landing page to use.

So how are things tracked?

Clicks: Clicks are tracked by providing your traffic source with 1 of 2 things: either your campaign URL or your landing page with Thrive's landing page pixel in place.

Clicks to The Offer (known as LP Clicks in Thrive) - These are tracked by placing Thrive's landing page code in any click through spots on your lander that take a visitor to the actual offer. They must go through this code in order to log the LP click in Thrive.

Conversions - Conversions occur once a visitor completes the desired action, be it a lead gen, email submit, purchase, or deposit. These are tracked by placing Thrive's postback, iframe, or image pixel with your affiliate network or advertiser.

Ok great, but how do we also pass back these conversions to the traffic source?

If you also want to track conversions back at your traffic source so that you can also optimize there, you will want to place a pixel or postback that your traffic source provides. You can place this in a few spots: On the traffic source level, on a specific campaign, or on a global level.

Checklist to Get Started:

• Gather your offer(s) from your affiliate network. Create a new offer in Thrive.
• Grab Thrive's postback or pixel from the Tracking tab of your Thrive login and give this to the affiliate network to place on the conversion point of the offer.
  • Note: If using postback, please make sure they pass in the unique clickID in the &subid= parameter.
  • Questions on setting up our postback or pixel? Visit this article
• Set up any landing pages in Thrive that you may have and wish to run before any offers.
• Set up your traffic source in Thrive. You can either choose from one of our pre-defined sources or add your own. 
• Set up your campaign. Assign it to your traffic source. Add in any landing page(s) and offer(s) in your campaign rotation that you wish to take the visitor to. You can adjust the rotation weights to whichever ratio you want to serve each component at.
• Provide your campaign URL to your traffic source. 
  • Want to track clicks without a campaign url redirect? No problem! You can use our landing page pixel (found inside each specific campaign under the General Info tab). Just place this pixel on your landing page, following the instructions found in the modal. You can then provide your landing page url to your traffic source rather than the campaign URL.
• If using a landing page, don't forget to grab your landing page click through code so that you can track clicks from landing page to the actual offer. This can be found under the landing page tab of your login. 
• Start Tracking!