Why you need a tracker
A tracker is a system that accounts for the traffic between your ads and the offer. It logs every click and hands you a report: which creative, geo, device, placement, and sub_id drove the conversion. Without it, you're optimizing blind. With a tracker, you kill what's losing money and scale what's profitable with surgical precision.
How the postback (S2S) works
A postback (server-to-server) is a signal from the affiliate network to your tracker: “a conversion happened on this particular click.” Here's the flow:
- A user clicks your ad → lands in the tracker, which assigns a unique click_id;
- The tracker redirects to the landing page/offer, passing along the click_id;
- The user converts → the affiliate network fires your postback URL with that click_id;
- The tracker records the conversion against that exact click (with all of its tags).
That's how you know exactly what converted. An S2S postback is more reliable than a pixel (it doesn't depend on the browser or ad blockers).
Sub_id — your tagging
Sub_id are the tags you use to label your sources (sub1=creative, sub2=placement, sub3=geo, and so on). Later, the report shows you a breakdown by each one. This is the foundation of optimization: “creative #3 on mobile in Poland gives 80% ROI, the rest are in the red” → you keep the winner.
Keitaro / Binom / RedTrack
| Tracker | Type | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| Keitaro | self-hosted | the market standard, built-in cloaking, flexible rules |
| Binom | self-hosted | blazing-fast reports, huge user base |
| RedTrack | cloud | no server needed, easier to get started |
Self-hosted (Keitaro/Binom) — you install it on your own server, full control and data privacy. Cloud (RedTrack) — no server, but your data sits in someone else's cloud and you pay by volume.
Trackers and cloaking
Many trackers (Keitaro) can do cloaking: based on rules (geo, device, bot checks), they show the moderator a white page while the real user gets the offer. So a tracker often counts and filters traffic at the same time.
How a tracker catches shave
You see your conversions in the tracker (via the postback), and your payouts in the affiliate network's dashboard. If the tracker shows more conversions than they paid for — that's shave. Without a tracker, you wouldn't even notice it.
The bottom line
A tracker turns affiliate marketing from a casino into a managed process: you see every breakdown, catch shave, and optimize with precision. A beginner can get by with a cloud tracker; at scale, people move to self-hosted Keitaro/Binom. And learning to calculate the profitability of each breakdown is what the guide on metrics is for. Landing pages for your campaigns — in the pool.