Self-hosted tracking solution

Aksana Shakal
Jul 14, 2024
4 min

Self-hosted tracking solution meaning

A self-hosted tracking solution or tracker is the first and most important tool an affiliate marketer needs. Without it, the process of running any advertising campaign will be like stumbling around in the dark looking for a treasure.

A tracker is a tool that captures information from the advertising network and information about approved conversions from the affiliate network in one place. The tracker can monitor many advertising campaigns at once, and you get a tool that contains all the statistics necessary for testing and optimization.

How to choose a type of tracker?

Choosing a type of tracker (self-hosted or cloud-based solutions), you need to understand your needs. First, with which countries you will work: nearby or around the world. What kind of workload your tracker will have: how many events you plan to process per month. This information will help you choose the right option among trackers and their various pricing plans.

There are two types of trackers: self-hosted and cloud-based solutions. There is no definite answer to which one is better. Let’s find out what these affiliate tracking software terms mean.

What is a self-hosted tracker?

If you choose a self-hosted tracker, you will have to spend money at the very start. You will need the budget for the purchase and installation of the server, but then you won’t have to pay more.

But in this case, there are some nuances you should keep in mind: the server tracker is an excellent choice for advertising campaigns in neighboring countries with the country where the server is installed. The further the server is from the country, the more traffic you will lose. Therefore, you will have to install additional servers to work with remote countries. In fact, you do not need to pay for events or the volume of traffic that will go through the tracker.

What is a cloud-based tracker?

Cloud-based trackers are faster than self-hosted ones. You can work with all parts of the world at once and get information as quickly as possible. It’s an excellent choice for campaigns in different GEOs, especially long-range ones. The speed of processing and data transfer will be as fast as for neighboring countries.

But there is one thing: you will have to immediately calculate how many events you need to process with the tracker and select the appropriate plan. If you exceed the limit, you will have to pay extra for additional events. As a rule, this limit is up to 100.000 events in free versions, and up to 1.000.000 events per month in the cheapest plan.

Self-hosted tracking solution examples

1. Keitaro

Keitaro is a complete self-hosted advertising tracker that is used to attribute the data monitoring from multiple sources, collect statistics of clicks, conversions and incoming parameters, along with connecting pixels and multi-offer landing page performance. Keitaro provides useful tracking features for advertisers, publishers and brand owners, now being among the best ad tracking tools for affiliate marketers.

Keitaro offers a 14 days free trial for its ad tracking software, while the paid plans charge starting from €49/month for the cheapest one (Starter). Any of Starter, Advanced and Expert plans for Keitaro can be used during that fortnight free trial.

We also have a step-by-step guide on how to set up conversion tracking at Keitaro in case you want to adjust it for seamless work!

2. Binom

Binom is a professional performance marketing ad tracking platform that aims to provide a seamless solution for data collection across the sources. Binom features over 20 metrics within its path and rules system that shows the data both in big picture and all the precise details. For its high performance and a quality analytics tool Binom is considered to be one of the top ad tracking software for marketers.

Binom has a free 14 day trial to get to know the platform’s functionality better, and the paid version will cost $69 a month.

We also have a step-by-step guide on how to set up conversion tracking at Binom in case you want to adjust it for seamless work!

You can find detailed manuals that explain how to connect a tracker to the RichAds advertising network in our blog. Search for “Affiliate Tracking Tutorials“.

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Aksana Shakal

Aksana Shakal has been in affiliate marketing for more than 5 years and is currently the Head of Content at RichAds, an ad-tech holding company. Her sphere of interest lies in affiliate marketing and SEO copywriting. In her articles, Aksana provided in-depth expertise in gaining traffic with different ad formats (push and in-page push ads, popunders and native ads) and verticals (Gambling, Dating, Nutra, Finance and much more). Aksana also loves reading novels and watching interviews on YouTube.