Traffic Sources & Media Channels

In the dynamic world of marketing, understanding your traffic sources and media channels is like having a treasure map to your target audience. These two pillars are at the heart of your online presence and can make or break your marketing strategy.

Traffic Types

Your source dashboard is designed to keep everything organized and easily accessible.

1. Media Channels

2. Marketing Partners

3. Custom Sources

Media Channels

Media channels include all media sources that lead traffic can be generated from such as Google, Meta, TikTok, Instagram, Youtube etc..

Easily integrate your Ad managers with a single click, and see the benefits of capturing all KPI’s from your active ad campaigns. For instance, you can swiftly compare the performance of each channel and make real-time adjustments to your marketing strategies.

Marketing Partners

Are you finding it a bit challenging to manage your affiliate partners? Or perhaps you're looking for a more straightforward way to expand your network of publishers? With Marketing Partners, we offer you a solution that simplifies affiliate management.

You'll gain full visibility into all affiliates promoting your offer, and you can easily set CAPs and monitor their traffic performance.

Custom Sources

As the name suggests, Custom Sources provides a user-friendly approach to data integration. It allows you to capture data sent to your offer by seamlessly integrating sources through tracking links or API connections.

It's a straightforward way to enhance your data collection capabilities.

Using Tracking Links

Tracking links are an effective tool that allows users to properly attribute lead data to a source.

These links can be given to a partner to install so whenever a traffic source uses this link whether it's directly linked or set up to redirect a lead, you will know exactly who this lead came from.

Pingtree generates the base tracking link URL by either the domain of offers set up in your general settings for your own page or the domain of any offer you have added within the Treehouse.

Additionally, Pingtree allows for 4 different types of link routing which will dynamically update the URL that you can send to a partner. Within each link routing type, you may also identify if you want to use a direct link or a redirect link.

Direct Sell:

External Domain: If you have a domain that is funneling traffic, you can use this tracking URL to capture all click and form data of a lead once they hit your offer.

Webflow Index: If you have a webflow set up through Pingtree, this URL will link to the index page of the webflow which is generally hosted outside of the Pingtree platform.

Direct Webflow: This will link directly into a webflow set up within Pingtree.

Example of what a tracking URL could look like:
https://yourdomainsite.com?cid=cp248&pid=mp505&external_clickid={sub1}&source_id={adv1}

Effectively using additional parameters will be covered in the following sections.

How Links Are Associated

In Pingtree when a custom source, marketing partner or media channel is created and integrated into a campaign, a unique value will be generated and attributed to a parameter labeled as "pid" known as Partner ID. This value will indicate the source type by using either "cs" for custom source, "mp" for marketing partner or "mc" for media channel. This will then be followed by a number which is unique to the actual source.

An example of a parameter for a newly created marketing partner could look like the following:

pid=mp505

In addition to this, Pingtree will automatically include another parameter that signifies the campaign as you could have the same source delivering traffic in multiple campaigns. All sources, regardless of source type, will have the same campaign ID parameter in the tracking link and could look like the following:

cid=cp248

Using Parameters

Correctly using parameters will be paramount in navigating your optimization strategies.

First of all, what are parameters?

Parameters are sets of field keys and values that are used to pass through pieces of data in a standardized way. These parameters are typically added to the base URL as a query string. The way pieces of data are passed through the backedn of one source to another is done through a process called field mapping. This involves matching the ways Pingtree can ingest data through your field keys and the field keys of other sources.

What are field keys and values?

The field key refers to the way in which a field is formatted of how you would ingest a certain value. Example: if your parameter is "source_id={value}" the first part of this, "source_id" is considered your field name or field key and this is what's used to pass the values in the backend from one source to another.

*One important thing to note: Field keys are case senstive meaning the field name in the URL parameter will need to match EXACTLY with the field you have set up in Pingtree. In the tracking links section, these field keys are already set to append the URL with the correct naming structure.

The "{value}" is where the actual data will come through. When looking at your lead data, you may see this in Pingtree for a particular lead "source_id={TikTok}". This would infer that the lead in this example was brought to you through a TikTok ad.

*Pingtree users may use field keys to ingest whatever pieces of data or values they'd like. In order to make your reporting consistent, it's recommended that there is standarization set among the types of data you are getting in a certain field.

What is field mapping?

Any time you are requesting data and values to be sent dynamically through the backend of another system, there needs to mapping instructions telling the sytem where and how to send and ingest data.

While Pingtree has a certain structure in which fields are named and formatted, sources that send the actual data for this (values) may have different naming conventions and formatting. In your tracking links that are given to a source, you will need to put in their specific field key in order to ingest the values correctly.

Example: Say you are trying to capture the actual ad creative that a lead used to land on your offer. In Pingtree's tracking links section in the individual source view, there's already a default option to add this into your tracking link. The field key is typically set as "utm_creative" (This is only a suggestion and it is not a requirement you use this specific field). In this example, you find out that your source is able to send this data to you and they capture it on their end with the field key - "creative_id". With this information, the tracking URL parameter would look like this: "utm_creative=creative_id"

When you are funneling lead traffic, there are certain pieces of data points that you will want to collect from the lead as well as the source that originally generated the lead. In order to capture this data, you can use parameters to pass the values from one source to the other.

In Pingtree, within your sources view, you will see the tracking URL that's been generated. This will only contain your base URL plus a query string of your "cid={value}" and your pid={value}. Pingtree's tracking links section in the source view allows users to add in additional, commonly requested parameters preset with the correct structure and formatting.

Tracking API

Pingtree's tracking API is an alternative to a tracking link. This methodology of tracking is commonly utilized for "Host and Post" traffic in which leads go through a form of offer hosted by the source but never touch any offer you're hosting.

Sources API

When it comes to your source's traffic direction via host and post, we're here to provide you with all the tools you need. We've seamlessly integrated Postman into Pingtree, eliminating the hassle of signing up for yet another account.

Similar to Pingtree's generation of a tracking link, the source API will automatically generate when a new source is created.

Instead of a tracking URL, there will be a form API url generated that will attribute leads to the specific source.

Implementing Sources API

Implementation the sources API token is simple. It involves sending the API URL to the source to install, along with any parameters you'd like them to pass through.

Pingtree also gives you the option of generating an authorization token. This information would also need to be delivered to the source for installation In Pingtree's case, we generate a Bearer token as our auth key. *Please note: If you select the generate new token button it will provide a Bearer token. If you do generate a new token at another point, you will need to send the updated Bearer token to the source to update as they will see a rejection response if the token is not installed properly.

Sources API Parameter

API parameters serve the same overall purpose as the tracking link parameters (please refer to tracking link parameter docs for a more detailed description of this)

Depending on how the source installs this form API and what system they're using may determine how they integrate the parameters, but you will still want to provide all field keys as well as values you expect in these parameters. If you already have the source's API instructions, you may send them your: field_keys={their_field_keys} for easy field mapping.