Postback calls are a way for advertisers to send conversion information back to Zemanta from their own servers or 3rd party tracking solutions like Adjust, Kochava, MAT, Tune, Voluum and others. Information passed on postback calls enables Zemanta to optimize campaigns. This guide will walk you through the basics of postback calls and show you how to set them up in your system.
Introduction
Understanding which click lead to a conversion is crucial for successful optimization. Zemanta connects conversions to clicks using postback ID parameter that must be passed on each postback call. The postback ID is passed to the advertiser (or third party) server on every click generated by Zemanta via {postbackid} macro.
This is what happens in a typical ad conversion scenario:
The user clicks on the link in the ad that is provided by Zemanta.
User’s browser reaches the Zemanta server which redirects the browser to the advertised page. The {postbackid} macro on the link URL is replaced with a unique value that identifies the click in the Zemanta system.
The user’s browser reaches the advertised page. The advertiser page or third-party system should store the postback ID that was passed in the URL for further referencing.
Once the user converts, the advertiser page or 3rd party tracking system issues a postback call to the Zemanta server with the corresponding postback ID value.
Setup guide
To set up the callback in your system follow these steps:
Make sure that every ad URL contains {postbackid} macro (you can find more information about macros here). This will ensure that the postback ID value is passed to your system. Engineers will have to make sure that this value is stored for every visit to your site that was generated by advertising campaigns.
Set up a conversion definition (you can reference instructions here). Your conversion definition URL is the postback URL that you need to call from your server on every conversion. You can see the postback URL in the image below.
For every conversion send a HTTP GET request to the postback URL with postback ID value appended to postbackid GET parameter.