Glossary

Conversion tracking

Conversion tracking is the process of recording that a visitor completed a desired action — a purchase, sign-up, install, or deposit — and attributing that action back to the specific click, campaign, and traffic source that produced it. It is how ad spend gets connected to revenue.

How it works

Two mechanisms dominate. Pixel (client-side) tracking fires a snippet in the browser on the confirmation page. Postback (server-to-server) tracking has the advertiser's server call the tracker with the click ID after validating the conversion. S2S is the standard in affiliate and performance marketing because it survives ad blockers and browser privacy restrictions.

Beyond the mechanism, conversion tracking involves policy: which events count (one offer can track registration, purchase, and rebill as separate types), deduplication of repeat postbacks, and an attribution window limiting how long after the click a conversion still counts.

Why it matters

Every optimization decision — which creative to scale, which placement to blacklist, which offer to drop — depends on conversions being counted accurately and attributed to the right slice of traffic. Broken tracking does not just lose data; it actively misdirects budget.

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