Vocabulary

Ad tracking has a vocabulary problem: the same word means different things at different companies, and two different words often mean the same thing. This page is the list PostbackX uses. Where the industry disagrees with us, that is noted.

The two kinds of "source"#

This is the distinction worth learning first, because both sides of your business get called a source somewhere.

Platform is where your ad spend goes — the traffic side. Facebook, NewsBreak, TikTok, Snapchat, Roku, Axon, BidSystem and Google are platforms. When a report asks you to filter by platform, it means this.

Offer source is where your offers come from — the money side. It is the affiliate platform that pays you, and the thing that sends conversions back to PostbackX. Everflow is an offer source.

Most of the industry calls an offer source a "network". PostbackX does not, because "network" also names an ad placement (Facebook's Audience Network) and a traffic partner. The REST API still uses network_id and network_name in field names for historical reasons — the field is an offer source.

Traffic, in order#

Campaign — the thing that ties everything together. A campaign takes a pixel, an offer and optionally a flow, and gives you one tracking link. Every click, conversion and pixel event that follows is attributed through it.

Click — one visit to your tracking link. PostbackX records it, assigns it a click id, and redirects the visitor onward. The click id is the thread that the whole system pulls on later; see attribution.

Offer — what you are promoting, and where the visitor converts. It has a destination URL and a payout.

Landing page — a page of your own that the visitor sees before the offer. Worth using when you want to warm the visitor up, or when you need Facebook's browser cookies (_fbp and _fbc), which can only be read client-side and materially improve Facebook's match quality.

The code and some report titles say "lander". Same thing.

Flow — a reusable routing rule: which landing pages and offers traffic should be split across, and in what proportion. Define one, use it in many campaigns, change it once and every campaign follows. Sometimes called a funnel.

Direct link — the alternative to redirecting. Your ad points straight at your landing page, and a JavaScript snippet creates the click record from the page itself. Use it when you want full control of the URL in the ad, or want to avoid redirect latency. See tracking snippets.

Money, in order#

Conversion — the visitor did the thing: submitted a form, bought, called. Your offer source tells PostbackX by calling a postback URL.

Payout — what you earn for one conversion. Revenue is payout summed.

Spend or cost — what the ad platform charged. Synced automatically from each connected platform.

Transaction id — the offer source's own id for a conversion. PostbackX uses it to recognise a duplicate delivery, so the same conversion is not counted twice.

Metrics#

These are computed for you, everywhere, the same way. Do not recompute them from the raw fields — if a report and your spreadsheet disagree, this is usually why.

When there is nothing to divide by — no spend, no clicks — the result is 0 rather than an error or a blank.

Getting conversions in and out#

Postback — a URL your offer source calls when a conversion happens. This is how conversions get into PostbackX. It carries the click id, so PostbackX knows which click to credit.

Pixel — how conversions get out of PostbackX, back to the ad platform, so its algorithm can optimize toward people who buy rather than people who click. For Facebook this uses the Conversions API.

CAPI — Facebook's Conversions API: server-to-server conversion reporting, as opposed to the browser pixel. More reliable, and it works when the browser blocks things.

Campaign mapping — the link between a PostbackX campaign and the ad platform's own campaign. Mapping them is what lets PostbackX put your spend and your revenue in the same row.