Mobile Tracking

You’ve always been able to track mobile traffic from mobile devices, but now you can track application installs as well. To enable tracking for your mobile application installs, configure it in the Additional Tracking Options area of the Campaign Details.

Promo Code Enforcement

Coupon craziness is everywhere, but it has been a challenge for advertisers to transition coupons and promo codes to performance marketing. There has always been an issue with advertisers wanting to protect their own promo codes from affiliate marketing. And affiliates want to have the best possible offer for their traffic.

Using LinkTrust’s new Promo Code Enforcement feature, advertisers can effectively track coupon code usage by affiliate. It’s easy to give affiliates exclusive coupons to increase conversions and it’s just as easy to setup a black list of codes that affiliates can’t use.

Merchant Revenue by Affiliate

When a merchant is willing to pay more for traffic from specific affiliates, the LinkTrust customer can set a custom merchant revenue earned per affiliate by campaign.

New Look and Feel

Were you getting sick of the Windows ’98 look of LinkTrust? So were we. As we make our way into bringing you new and powerful tools in tracking, it was obvious we needed to bring LinkTrust into the current decade. This new coat of paint and icon update is our first step in making our user interface more approachable and easy to use. You’ll be seeing more improvements as our development roadmap progresses next year.

A few menu names and locations have changed, so be sure to attend the webinar or watch the short help video to ease your transition to the future. One time-saving update we’ve made is that you can now access affiliate and campaign specific reports directly from affiliate and campaign details without ever leaving the page.

New Fraud Controls

With fraudsters finding new ways to wreak their havoc everyday, sometimes performance marketing feels like the Wild West. LinkTrust tracking software continues to improve fraud controls, giving you more security in managing your traffic. In this release we’ve included four new ways to help you cut down on fraudulent conversions and clicks.

• Cookie-less tracking is now more efficient and secure with a white list of IP Addresses for AFID and Click ID Postsbacks. This security feature locks down the ability to post transactions into your account unless they originate from the IPs in the white list. Locking this down is as simple as checking the option in the Additional Tracking Options in a campaign details.
• Automatically block traffic coming from known public proxy IP’s. We update the public proxy list daily to prevent fraud and protect the merchant from questionable traffic. The blocked traffic can be redirected to another campaign, a separate landing page or error page of your choice. Enable this rerouting feature on the Campaign Filters page.
• When click and conversion IPs don’t match, prevent them from being automatically approved transactions. Although there may be cases where the IP’s change and the transaction is legitimate, this feature allows an affiliate manager to review each case before approval
• Ensure that a Merchant Reference ID is required and unique by using the Duplicate Merchant Reference ID Filter that prevents conversions from being approved for affiliates when the ID provided by the merchant is a duplicate.

Default Test Affiliate

Just like car companies use crash test dummies to determine the safety of their vehicles, you can use your Test Affiliate to work out the kinks on new campaigns. There might not be any broken bones if you don’t set up a campaign correctly, but broken links or landing pages are a pain. Avoid the headache that comes from missing images or creatives by sending your traffic to the Test Affiliate before it goes live to your publishers.

All traffic you send through the Test Affiliate will be tracked and recorded, but revenue and commissions may be set to zero, eliminating accounting nightmares. You can also disable all click filters on test traffic.

Campaign Groups

Campaign Groups were born as a quick work around for LinkTrust customers needing to manage campaigns in several currencies. Building the ability to apply multiple languages and currencies into LinkTrust is a big project we’re working toward, but we know you need a solution now. So until we can give you Yens, Euros and Rupees, we’ve made a few adjustments based on the suggestions of some of our creative clients to create Campaign Groups. With this new feature, you can designate that all campaigns running in a particular country/currency are in one group. For example all campaigns running in France, Spain, Germany and other EU countries can be grouped into a Campaign Group called Euro traffic. This group’s commissions revenues will be paid in Euros. You can build a group for any currency you need.

In addition to the multi-currency scenario, Campaign Groups give you the ability to have two-layers of organization when utilized with Campaign Categories. This would be useful for networks which use a variety of offer types within one vertical. Example: If your network is running Healthcare offers and uses the Campaign Category to designate each one as a Healthcare offer and uses a Campaign Group to differentiate between Incentive, Email and Search offers within the Healthcare Category.

Affiliate Access to Conversion Details

LinkTrust customers have always been able to drill-down in their reports to access details on the transaction level. Now you can let your affiliate download the details of their conversions in their Affiliate Center.

Like seeing your credit card statement helps you adjust your budget for the next month, letting your affiliate see his or her conversion details will help them budget their traffic allocations for your offers. When your affiliates can break out the reports and know the referrer for each conversion and get access to the Affiliate Reference ID they can know which traffic sources convert better, give you higher quality traffic and qualify for a better payout.

Additional Features

More Affiliate Management Tools

• Know which affiliates are active users of your network by searching to see which affiliates have never logged into their account. Additionally, you can send a message to all of the resulting affiliates directly from the search results page.
• Adding more places to add payments means that you can manage your affiliate payments more easily. When you are reviewing a specific affiliate’s commission report and find that an additional payment should be reflected there, you can add the payment without leaving the screen. You can also review recorded payments on the Affiliate Payment Details page.
• With hundreds of affiliate applications flooding your network, there simply isn’t enough time to go through them all with a fine-toothed comb. Maybe you meet someone at a show later and he tells you that he applied to be an affiliate but has never been approved. Now you can go back and search all of the pending applications by name to find the one you missed. Along with searching by name, a variety of other search criteria is now available on the pending affiliate applications page.

Auto-Assign Campaigns for New Affiliates

We’ve made it easier to get new affiliates up and running. You can select which campaigns will automatically assigned to all newly approved affiliate applications. This makes the new affiliate signup process a breeze for the affiliate manager while giving the new affiliate enough campaigns and information to hit the ground running.

Custom Payout and Revenue by Sub ID and Creative

You asked and we listened! Now you have increased flexibility when it comes to affiliate payouts or merchant revenue. Tie an affiliate’s payout and/or your own merchant revenue to a specific Sub ID. Also, allow all affiliates using a specific campaign creative to get paid more!

Adjustment Log Improvements

We know. In the past our adjustment log was not that easy to use. We’re sorry and to make it up to you, we’ve redesigned it and given it functionality you can use without being a human calculator. Now, to make it easier to know which transactions need to be adjusted, the Campaign’s Name, Merchant’s Name, and Affiliate’s Name and are displayed with their respective IDs on a transactional level. And best of all, you can delete a mistaken adjustment instantly.

Improved Creatives API

The Creatives API has been improved to make the information included with each API response more complete, allowing you to utilize those creatives faster and more efficiently.

Global Merchant Pixel

For merchant’s who use a single confirmation page for multiple products, this improvement to the Global Pixel means the Campaign ID (CID) no longer needs to be passed when performing a Click ID postback. Now the pixel tracks on the Click ID only.

1,000 OfferBoard Spots

We’ve opened up the LinkTrust OfferBoard to allow all LinkTrust customers to post 1,000 offers to share with other LinkTrust customers. Share freely!