Traffic Acquisition

Introduction

Traffic Acquisition is a subproduct of Yield Intelligence, that lets publishers running paid traffic from a number of sources match the data from demand platforms API to the revenue collected in Assertive Yield. This lets you monitor ROI, discrepancies between clicks bought and received sessions, cost per session, and others on the campaign level. For some demand platforms, we are also providing granularity on Adset, Ad, Section, and publisher (where the ad appeared).

Tracker settings

To connect the DSPs you need to go to Settings -> Spend and click on Add Service Account. Depending on the connection you choose you will be asked either to log-in to your account or provide API access.

Available DSP platforms to connect to:

• Facebook
• Google Ads (AdWords)
• Taboola
• Outbrain
• TikTok
• Yahoo
• Twitter
• SnapChat
• Baidu

Once ready, you can choose the DSP you have just connected in the center part of the window and choose from a list of sub-accounts you want to track. You can use multiple.

Campaign settings

From the API of the platforms, we can pull data by campaign name or ID, adset name or ID and ad name or ID. But this data is not available on the page once the user clicks on the ad, where our tracker is. The way Assertive Yield matches the data requires you to pass one of these "keys" to the URL, which is reportable on our end.

What you need to do when you create the campaigns is to choose a UTM parameter to pass an identifiable key in the URL.

For example, in Facebook, you can specify each creative to pass the campaign ID by adding this utm_campaign={{campaign.id}} at the end of the URL.

You can choose between five different UTM parameters for your convenience, it is important however to be consistent in building the campaign URLs. You can have different spend keys for each platform but you need to use the same UTM parameter across all of them.

Binding the data

The last step of the integration is to match the UTM parameter we see on the tracker with the value we pull from the API. On the same page, you can see the AY Yield Analytics Key where you can select the UTM parameter where you are passing the keys, and then select what is passed for each platform.

Following the above example you will need to choose UTM Campaign and on Facebook Spend Key set - Campaign ID.

Verify

If you have traffic already running with the right URL setup and have completed the steps above, you should start seeing data in Traffic Acquisition -> By Campaign soon after.

You can also check Logs - Spend Import to see if there are any issues with the API imports for Revenue.

Enabling real-time spend data from Outbrain and Taboola Besides the API integration, which is still needed, but has it's delays, you can also take advantage of real-time spend data from both Outbrain and Taboola. In order to do so you need to:

1. Ask your representative to enable sending the CPC you are paying for each user as a parameter in the URL
2. The following configuration of the tracker would enable the tracking of this data:

window.assertive.acquisition = {
    enabled: true, // defaults to false

    costParams: ['utm\_cost'], // list (array) of url parameters to check for the cost. Will check for numeric as well as encrypted values behind these parameters - defaults to undefined (disabled)

    currency: 'USD', // default USD

    clickIdParams: undefined,

    // default is an array of common clickId url parameters:

    // [

    //     'fbclid', // facebook

    //     'gclid', // google

    //     'tblci', // taboola

    //     'obclid', // outbrain

    //     'vmcid', // gemini (yahoo)

    // ],

    // !!!only change if needed!!!

    },

3. Besides that, you need to set the parameter and a {cpc} macro within Outbrain and Taboola to match the configured costParams.

As an example, following the above setup, you will need to add &utm_cost={cpc} at the end of your landing page URL within Taboola and Outbrain for the setup to work.

4. For Taboola only there is one extra step needed - as they are sending the data in an encrypted way.

Please go to Settings -> Taboola and supply the decryption key there.

Popular issues with the setup may include:

• After a password change of the account, the connection will no longer be active, and you might need to reconnect the spend account
• Having set different currencies in the GAM account and the buying accounts, resulting in discrepancies. You might need to align account currencies to overcome this;
• Using the same utm_campaing name across different accounts without having them all connected or having traffic outside of the buy platform to the same URL - this may result in discrepancies (usually showing more sessions than clicks bought)