SubID and Postback Tracking: Measure What Really Pays Off

Many publishers just look at their total earnings at the end of the month. That is useful for the budget, but useless for improving: you do not know which pages are working and which serve no purpose. Two Prelinker tools solve this problem: the SubID and the postback.

The SubID: one label per page or campaign

A SubID is a value you add to your tracking link. It has no effect on the visitor, but it then shows up in your statistics. In practice, it is a short name of your choosing: for example blog-seniors-article-confiance or ville-lyon-sorties.

When a signup comes in, you see which SubID it matches. So you know it was this page, and not another, that produced it. This precision is what lets you move from a hunch to a decision.

How to name your SubIDs well

A SubID must still be readable in six months. Adopt a simple convention and stick to it:

• One SubID per page. The name of the page or a short code that identifies it.
• A prefix for the source. For example "blog", "video", "bio" to tell the blog, a video description or a social network bio link apart.
• No personal information. Never a name, email address or data about a reader in a SubID: that would go against GDPR.
• No accents or spaces. Lowercase letters, hyphens, digits: plain characters avoid technical surprises.

Keep a small table linking each SubID to its exact location. Without it, you risk no longer understanding your own codes.

The postback: sending results back to you

The postback is an automatic mechanism: when an event occurs (a signup, a subscription), the network sends a message to an address you have provided. That address belongs to your own tracking tool, whether it is an automatically fed spreadsheet, a dashboard or an analytics tool.

In practice, you get in your own figures the same result as in the publisher area, but cross-referenced with your other data: traffic sources, campaigns, keywords. If you use an ad network or paid campaigns, this feedback lets you know whether the spend is profitable. For general explanations of payment and tracking models, see the article on CPA, CPL and revshare.

The technical setup requires a minimum of skills. If you prefer not to do it yourself, the publisher area's statistics by SubID are more than enough to get started.

A monthly review method in four steps

Measuring is pointless if you do not act. Here is a routine to repeat every month:

1. Export or note down the results by SubID: clicks, signups, earnings.
2. Sort the pages into three groups: those that pay off, those with traffic but no results, and those with neither.
3. Act on each group. Develop and interlink the winning pages, review the offer or placement of pages with traffic but no results, drop or merge the silent pages.
4. Note the changes so you can compare the following month.

Interpretation pitfalls

A SubID gives a result, not an explanation. A page that earns nothing may have poorly targeted traffic, an unsuitable offer or simply too few visitors to draw a conclusion. Avoid judging on a handful of clicks. Likewise, a page that earns a lot may owe it to a single very loyal visitor: always look at the trend over several weeks.

Also keep in mind that, in the revenue share model, a member's earnings are spread over time. A page that looks modest today can gain value with renewals. Prelinker commission explains this mechanism.

Combining the SubID with social networks

On TikTok, Instagram or YouTube, traffic goes through the bio link or the description. To find out which platform works best, use one SubID per network, carried over to the page of your site they point to. Our article on TikTok affiliate marketing shows how to put it all together, always going through your own site.

An example of a tracking table

A simple spreadsheet is enough to start. Create one row per SubID, with these columns: page name, link placement, number of clicks, number of signups, number of subscriptions, the month's earnings and a comment. Fill it in once a month from the publisher area.

After three months, you have a clear view of your performance. You spot the pages that are improving, those that are stagnating and those that are declining. This trend view is far more useful than a global total, and it helps you decide where to spend your next hour of work: improving a piece of content, writing a new one on the same topic or deleting a useless page.

To finish, keep a record of your naming conventions in a shared document if several people work on the project. Nothing is more frustrating than finding incomprehensible codes after a few months, or seeing two people use different conventions for the same page.

Lastly, put all this in a wider frame with the complete Prelinker guide, and if you are placing your first links, reread the Prelinker smartlink to position it correctly.