Affiliate trackers

An affiliate tracker sits between the ad and the offer. Every click from a traffic source lands on a tracking link first, the tracker gives that click an ID, records where it came from (source, campaign, placement, creative, country, device) and then sends the visitor on, usually to a prelander and then to the offer. When the CPA network later reports a conversion through a postback URL, it passes that click ID back, and the tracker ties the money to the exact click that produced it.

That join is the whole point. The traffic source knows what you spent, the network knows what you earned, and neither knows the other. The tracker is the one place where cost and revenue meet at the level of a single placement or lander, which is the level at which campaigns are actually optimised: cut this publisher ID, raise the bid on that one, drop lander B.

Most trackers do more than count. They split traffic between landers and offers by weight, route visitors by rules (country, device, OS, ISP), import costs from ad network APIs, filter obvious bots, and push conversion data back to platforms like Meta or Google. The discipline behind all of this is covered in tracking and attribution; this category is about the software.

Start with the one question that splits the market in two: do you want to run a server?

1. Self-hosted or cloud. Keitaro and Binom are installed on a VPS you rent and administer. You pay a flat licence, the click data sits on your machine, and the cost does not grow with traffic, only the server does. Voluum and RedTrack are hosted services: nothing to install, patch or monitor, but you pay per tracked event and your data lives with the vendor. If nobody on the team is comfortable with SSH, a Linux update or a full disk at 3 a.m., the choice is already made for you: go cloud.

2. Your volume, in events, not clicks. Cloud pricing counts events, and a visit plus a lander click plus a conversion is three of them. Estimate your monthly events honestly before comparing plans. At a few hundred thousand clicks a month, cloud is comfortable. At tens of millions, the overage line on a cloud invoice can exceed the whole yearly cost of a self-hosted licence plus a strong server.

3. Where your traffic comes from. On push, pop and native, what matters is redirect speed, cost import from the network and fast placement-level reports. On Meta, Google and TikTok, what matters more is sending conversions back through the platforms' conversion APIs so their algorithms can optimise. RedTrack builds its product around that second case; the self-hosted trackers treat it as one feature among many.

4. The team. Count users, whether you need per-user permissions, and whether someone other than the buyer (an owner, a finance person) needs read-only reports. Several plans limit users or domains more than traffic.

5. Data ownership and risk. With a self-hosted tracker, nobody else can see your winning placements or suspend your account. With cloud, a vendor outage is your outage, and a billing dispute can lock you out of your own reports. Weigh that against the risk of your own server going down with nobody watching it.

6. Ecosystem. Check that the tracker has ready templates for your traffic sources and networks, so click IDs and costs are passed without hand-built macros. A missing template is not a blocker, but it costs setup time and invites mistakes.

Start with the option that matches your current volume and skills, and decide in advance what monthly click volume or cost would make you switch.

A few things really separate trackers once the basics (campaigns, postbacks, reports) are covered:

• Redirect latency. Every redirect hop costs a slice of visitors, more on slow mobile connections in tier 2 and tier 3 countries. Where the tracker's server sits relative to your audience matters as much as the software. Self-hosted lets you place the server near your geo; cloud trackers route through their own infrastructure.
• Report speed at depth. Grouping a month of data by source, then placement, then lander, then offer is where weaker setups stall. This is what you do all day, so test it with your own data during a trial.
• Cost accuracy. Automatic cost import from the ad network, and how often it syncs. Stale costs mean you optimise on wrong ROI.
• Conversion API support. Server-to-server conversion sending to Meta, Google, TikTok and others, with deduplication. Essential on social traffic, marginal on push and pop.
• Bot and fraud filtering. Built-in filters, IP and user agent lists, and whether filtered clicks are kept separate from real ones in reports.
• Pricing mechanics. Flat licence or per-event, what counts as an event, overage rates, data retention limits, domain and user caps.
• Automation. Rules that pause placements or change bids through network APIs, and how much of that is locked to higher plans.

Pricing follows the self-hosted versus cloud split. Self-hosted trackers sell a licence with no charge per click: as of September 2026, Keitaro lists plans from 40 euros a month on yearly billing and Binom lists its self-hosted v2 at $149 a month, or $104 a month on yearly billing. On top of that you pay for the server, which scales with your daily clicks.

Cloud trackers charge by events with an included allowance and an overage rate. As of September 2026, Voluum starts at $119 a month on annual billing for 1 million events, and RedTrack at $79 a month for 2 million events, with overage charged per thousand events above that.

The practical consequence: cloud is cheaper at low volume and more expensive at high volume. Retention limits and add-ons (faster cost sync, extra users, anti-fraud) also move the real price well above the headline on some plans, so compare full invoices, not starting prices.