Trackier: Helping retailers and brand owners boost affiliate marketing sales with real-time data analytics
About Trackier
Trackier is a platform that helps companies grow their business through affiliate marketing. It provides advertisers with an easy-to-use performance marketing platform to create, optimize, and track their marketing campaigns in real time. The platform won the 2019 Expert’s Choice Award, 2019 Great User Experience Award, and the 2019 Supreme Software Award from FinanceOnline, a popular B2B software review platform. Trackier serves over 200 customers across 25 countries.
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Contact usTrackier improves inbound marketing success for agencies and brands through a scalable performance marketing software on Google Cloud that tracks affiliate leads from any platform and discovers real-time metrics using BigQuery.
Google Cloud results
- Delivers real-time reports with Pub/Sub for streaming data pipeline to meet 90,000 requests per second at peak
- Handles 3 billion clicks a day on Compute Engine, while maintaining low latency for customers
- Reduces 50% of archival storage cost with cold storage on Cloud Storage
Processes 10 TB of database queries daily to track conversion rates in real time
Affiliate marketing is on the rise. According to the Statista, advertisers are expected to spend $8.2B on affiliate marketing by 2022. Merchants and retailers are keen to tap affiliate partners, from bloggers to well-known personalities, to promote their products and expand their marketing reach. For example, a game publisher may work with gamers to promote game subscription or a fintech company may work with personal finance bloggers to promote credit cards and insurance plans.
So how do advertisers attribute a particular sale to an affiliate partner, or see campaign data in real time when they may be working with hundreds of partners?
Trackier, performance management software that owner CloudStuff runs on Google Cloud, simplifies affiliate marketing. Instead of using spreadsheets to manage publishers, conversions, and affiliate payments, advertisers simply create an account on Trackier that creates a pixel code for real-time tracking. Affiliates earn a commission for each conversion when their followers click through the tracking pixel URL and buy products on the offer page.
“Invoicing can be a headache for advertisers who manually track multiple campaigns and pay affiliates for qualified leads. Our application on Compute Engine integrates seamlessly with third-party applications such as our customers’ billing systems to streamline the payment process.”
—Udit Verma, co-founder, TrackierBy helping advertisers effectively manage their publishers and track real-time metrics such as conversions, user action, and sales, Trackier experienced exponential growth, from a billion clicks per year in 2017 to three billion clicks a day in 2020. Trackier expects that number to grow by 50% by the third quarter of 2021.
“From day one, we built a highly scalable web application on Compute Engine that’s optimized for growth,” says Faizan Ayubi, Chief Executive Officer at Trackier. “Instead of reserving cloud resources for traffic spikes at a fixed monthly cost, Google Cloud gives us the flexibility to pay only for what we use, which is an effective way to save cost.”
“Invoicing can be a headache for advertisers who manually track multiple campaigns and pay affiliates for qualified leads. Our application on Compute Engine integrates seamlessly with third-party applications such as our customers’ billing systems to streamline the payment process," says Udit Verma, co-founder at Trackier. This enables affiliates to check earned commissions on Trackier’s dashboard and request payment through their digital payment gateway of choice.
Apart from using Compute Engine to host its web application, Trackier employs a number of Google Cloud technologies including BigQuery for real-time data analytics, Cloud Storage for storing clicks and conversions, Pub/Sub for streaming data, and Cloud CDN for caching content.
“Our team used to spend hours optimizing our network to improve query speed for our dashboard. Thanks to BigQuery’s managed services and scalability, we can focus on developing new features such as automation in Trackier version 2.0 that helps customers save time by reducing repetitive tasks.”
—Hemant Mann, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, TrackierProviding value to customers with real-time conversion analytics and reporting
Data is at the heart of Trackier’s dashboard for advertisers to see real-time campaign performance and affiliates to check commissions from campaigns. Before moving to BigQuery in 2017, Trackier used an open-source database management system to analyze campaign data. However, reporting was slow due to complex data structure and reporting requirements since customers look at different performance metrics. Trackier knows that any delay in real-time analytics affects the customer’s ability to finetune their campaigns to improve traffic and sales.
With BigQuery, Trackier is able to collect and analyze data quickly, so customers can track the conversion on its live dashboard as soon as it happens. Trackier uses Pub/Sub to stream 10 TB of data per day into BigQuery for real-time processing. At its peak, Pub/Sub handles up to 90,000 requests per second.
“Our team used to spend hours optimizing our network to improve query speed for our dashboard,” says Hemant Mann, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Trackier. “Thanks to BigQuery’s managed services and scalability, we can focus on developing new features such as automation in Trackier version 2.0 that helps customers save time by reducing repetitive tasks.”
Using the analytics capabilities of BigQuery, Trackier helps advertisers identify which affiliate websites drive the most traffic for sales and maximize relationships with high-performing affiliates. On the other hand, advertisers can pause non-performing campaigns (campaigns that received at least 100 clicks and zero conversions in the past 30 days).
It also uses BigQuery to protect advertisers from ad fraud (where affiliates send traffic that cannot be converted to sales). Advertisers can easily set up anti-fraud rules on Trackier's campaign dashboard for a real-time view of suspicious activities such as low click to install or conversion time. They can also take action on fraud traffic quickly, blocking dishonest affiliates so they don't spend valuable budget and time on fake clicks.
Internally, Trackier's business development team uses BigQuery to support business planning. For example, when sales slowed down during COVID-19, the team identified gaming and fintech as growth sectors supported by new user data. Based on these insights, it adapts sales content to attract potential customers from these industries.
Trackier uses Cloud Storage for storing 30 TB of media assets, specifically creatives related to customer campaigns and backups of its databases. For any data that’s 90 days or older, it uses the cold storage option on Cloud Storage to archive the data and reduce storage cost by half.
“From day one, we built a highly scalable web app on Compute Engine that’s optimized for growth. Instead of reserving cloud resources for traffic spikes at a fixed monthly cost, Google Cloud gives us the flexibility to pay only for what we use which is an effective way to save cost.”
—Faizan Ayubi, Chief Executive Officer, TrackierServing content on a global scale to meet changing demands
Application time is important to Trackier's global business because multiple customers can be running campaigns in any region in a given day. A viral campaign may result in many users clicking on Trackier links on affiliate websites. If app performance slows down, customers will not be able to quickly access the advertiser website via the link provided and may abandon their purchase as a result.
To buffer for sudden traffic spikes, Trackier uses managed instance groups (MIGs) on Compute Engine for autoscaling event tracking VMs based on the traffic load. At the same time, Trackier uses Cloud Load Balancing to distribute traffic evenly for consistent user experience.
In combination with Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud CDN accelerates web performance for users everywhere at all times. Trackier caches and quickly serves static web content for customer campaigns via Cloud CDN to minimize latency. When a user clicks a link on the website, the app then distributes the traffic to dynamic content on the customer website.
IT optimization for innovation and growth
To broaden its service offering, Trackier is currently exploring Dataproc for extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines for customers who may want to load event data into their data warehouse for further analysis in the future.
“Like Google, we're focused on solving customer problems with innovation,” says Faizan. “Google Cloud managed services such as BigQuery has really helped us to scale resources and build new features quickly, without committing to fixed IT costs. We will continue to look to Google Cloud to optimize our data flow to be the industry's best performance management product.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Trackier
Trackier is a platform that helps companies grow their business through affiliate marketing. It provides advertisers with an easy-to-use performance marketing platform to create, optimize, and track their marketing campaigns in real time. The platform won the 2019 Expert’s Choice Award, 2019 Great User Experience Award, and the 2019 Supreme Software Award from FinanceOnline, a popular B2B software review platform. Trackier serves over 200 customers across 25 countries.