Offer sources are exactly that - what, or who, provides your offers.
This could be a third-party network, a direct advertiser/product owner, or even yourself.
There are three reasons to use offer sources:
- For general categorisation of offers. On the offers page you have category, but can also toggle to group by source as well
- For templating the way you pass data to offers. I'll show an example below.
- For setting the default conversion tracking setup, which makes it easier to configure later (copy/paste convenience).
Configuring data passing
This is the key thing that offer sources provide. Embrace it!
Most offer sources will involve third-party platforms, such as Cake, HasOffers, LinkTrust, Clickbank, etc.
These systems can be passed data under certain URL parameters, and often you'll want to pass data in the same way for every offer.
Lets take the Cake Platform template as an example:
With the Cake platform we are able to pass data under s1-s5 along with some other parameters.
For any third-party platform you generally need to check their documentation or link generation tools to figure out what these fields are.
Here in the offer source, we can list these fields and some values we want to pass by default for them.
You can select from FunnelFlux data, as well as enter custom data/strings.
Above, we are passing funnel ID, traffic source ID, the campaign value from the traffic source, and the all important Hit ID that our system generates for tracking.
Now, the handy part -- when you later make an offer, if you pick this offer source, it will automatically fill the data passing section to have these values.
This way you don't need to add these parameters manually for every offer from a source. Youre base URL can just contain the offer-specific parameters like offer ID, affiliate ID etc., making your life easier with offer setup.
Conversion tracking tokens
The purpose of this section is to describe how you would pass data back into a postback URL or our Javascript.
Generally the offer source system is going to be the one detecting a conversion and sending it back to FunnelFlux (unless you're the product owner and you're triggering the conversions yourself on the pages).
We want their system to inject our important Hit ID into our tracking codes, as well as conversion revenue, and probably order/transaction IDs.
So, you can specify the tokens this third-party platform uses for this data, like so:
Look back earlier in this document -- we passed our Hit ID under the s5 field, and the token from the Cake platform for that s5 field's data is #s5#. Likewise to inject payouts we use #price# and for transaction ID we use #tid#.
After entering these, the postback URL generated is:
https://domain.com/pb/?hit=#s5#&tx=#tid#&rev=#price#Now that we know this, for any offer using this source, we can conveniently tell you the default postback URL to configure over in their system, and likewise for the Javascript conversion tracking.
Note that all of this is just for convenience, it is not critical configuration.
You can modify your offers at any stage to pass data in any way you want, the above tokens don't break anything if they are incorrect (as long as the ones you are actually using over at the offer source platform are correct), and if you modify an offer source it won't update existing offers, as this could break their configuration.