First Blog – Not as challenging as I thought.

Writing the first blog isn’t something that I thought would be an issue. With TrackingDesk being an awesome platform with plenty of features, I imagined that ideas would pop out of my mind very quickly. In fact, they are coming out at a very fast pace. The problem is; which one do I pick first to make sure we start on the right foot?

Blogging about the tracking features we offer eventually rose to the top of the short list, which I had difficulty compiling. Indeed, starting with API integrations, landing page rotations or our analytics would be too heavy. And yet, I wasn’t even convincing myself. So I took a different route.

Let’s not talk about what TrackingDesk offers. Let’s talk about what I have learned over the years and how that eventually led me to build TrackingDesk. Hopefully after hearing that, you will somehow, and not too remotely, relate to my (former) pain.

The first time I heard about pixel tracking was in 1998. At the time, I was starting my career in online marketing. I didn’t know anything, and to tell you the truth, even the senior guys didn’t know much about it. It was the beginning of the digital advertising industry and we were all quite ignorant.
So when I went to my boss to tell him we need to place pixel tracking on our site, he looked at me and told me: “I don’t know what you’re talking about” and he took me to our Dev guy so I could “explain” what I “understood” from that guy (with the strong Californian accent) who tried to explain what it was. The tech guy’s answer was: “There is no way we put the code of another company in our site!”

Needless to say I lost that deal, which could have brought tons of revenue to our company.

That same story repeated itself quite a few times until 2003 when we finally agreed to proceed with another important deal at stake. It took about three months to actually implement a tracking pixel on our site. Needless to say, we lost that one too.

Looking back at the why, how and when, my conclusion is that our people were talented and through technology we were able to beat our competition. And yet, the lack of tools and (sometimes) business understanding, placed a heavy burden on our marketing.

These days, you would assume that the above stories don’t occur. But you would be wrong. Every day, we have users coming to us just because they have issues with tracking implementations.

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Enter TrackingDesk.
In order to overcome fears, a lack of tools, a lack of technology and moreover to simply make things super easy for affiliates and media buyers, we have covered all aspects of tracking so digital marketers never lose a deal, time, or money over a piece of code.

Practically, what does this mean?
These days, most affiliate programs run on third-party software such as Hasoffers, Cake Marketing, LinkTrust or CellXpert. Those companies have clear instructions on whatyour server pixel tracking should look like:
ex: https://trackingpixeldomain.com/serverpixel.php?subid={transactionid}
As you can see, there is a “transactionid” which eventually needs to be filled with some information that you (the marketer) should have passed to your tracking links.
Before you understand how to pass this information, and how you get it back into your ad server or any other system you are using, you normally give up and start sending traffic hoping to see some conversions by logging in the affiliate program you are promoting. Sound familiar?

So how did we solve this pain?
Simply by pre-configuring all those affiliate programs’ software in TrackingDesk.

What does that mean for you?
Simply “copy>paste” the codes we neatly display in your TrackingDesk account.

Thanks for reading, and if you didn’t start using TrackingDesk, give it a try and you’ll see how quickly we can relieve your daily pain.