Tracking setup for TONIC

This guide is for the search arbitrage provider TONIC.

Search arbitrage tracking in general can be quite tricky given the presence of keywords and various required data parameters.

Depending on how you want to pass this data, there are also multiple approaches.

Below we'll describe the basic setup using our offer source template, and the two approaches you can use for testing different keywords.

Creating the TONIC offer source

Firstly, create a new offer source and use our TONIC template.

Note the data passing section:

Here there are some very important things to consider:

• We are passing adtitle and site using a {data-xxx} token. This means the values will come from your traffic source via the link you use there -- so it's important that your traffic source has corresponding URL tracking fields of title and site_id, and that these always pass appropriate values to TONIC
• We are passing our unique hit ID for tracking under subid4 - so the postback used in TONIC must pass this value back

Now, checking the conversion tracking tab, you can see the templated postback, which you should place at TONIC:

Configuring traffic sources used

As mentioned earlier, we need to pass custom data (ad title and site IDs) from the traffic source, and it's these values that are passed through to TONIC.

Check the earlier picture -- we use the {data-title} and {data-site_id} token.

So, I would recommend making a new traffic source dedicated to search arbitrage via Tonic, e.g. TikTok (TONIC). You can use the appropriate template, then add or adjust the parameters. Taking our TikTok template as an example:

Here I added site_id and set it to the placement token, and added the title tracking field with REPLACE as the value.

Because TikTok has no ad titles/headlines, you would need to manually replace this in your URL, per ad, to pass an appropriate title parameter through.

Taking another example of Taboola:

Here, Taboola does have data passing for titles and site IDs. However the URL parameter names in our template didn't match the data passing scheme for our TONIC template. So, I just edited there names to title and site_id to line things up.

Note that we might change templates over time, and whether you could pass data automatically with tokens or not depends on the traffic source.

Facebook for example does not have site IDs, nor passing of headlines via the URL, so you would always need to manually configure data if doing search arbitrage between Facebook and TONIC.

Passing keyword data to offers

For TONIC offers, you would create an offer then use your arbitrage domain as the base page URL. The rest of the URL structure would be handled by the data passing section.

TONIC doesn't expect keywords to be passed (other search arbitrage partners do) -- rather you pass network/site/adtitle and they presumably generate search results based on this adtitle parameter.

So, there's two ways to vary these ad title values.

Option 1: Pass in the URL from the traffic source

This is the configuration you are using above.

With this, your offer would just be a single offer (the search arbitrage domain URL) and you would create different ads --> which can pass different ad title values --> generate different search results.

In reporting, you would break down by this ad title tracking field to analyse performance.

Option 2: Passing at the offer level

Now, since this is all data passing configured by the offer source/offer, you could instead opt to hard-code it at the offer level.

So you could create your offer, pick TONIC as the offer source, then go to data passing and add an offer-level override for the adtitle field, using the custom string option.

In this way you could create multiple offers for different ad titles and rotate these in your funnels like any offer.

Now, the values would not depend on your ads in the traffic source and are controlled inside FunnelFlux:

Now in reporting you could have your keywords separated into different offers.

The upside here is more control within FunnelFlux and being able to change these at any time or add/remove pages from rotation without touching your ads.

The downside is more manual work with creating offers and configuring your funnel, and potential lack of congruency between your ads and your search arbitrage pages.

You'll also need to consider compliance, and whether for sources with ad titles, the search arbitrage partner is OK with you passing various keywords that may not match the ad displayed to users.