Use this guide to learn how to properly track whitelisted ads using 3rd party landing pages.
What are 3rd party landing pages?
Any landing page that doesn’t belong to your top-level domain. It’s usually a blog, publisher site, or editorial that contains links to your site.
For example.. let’s say Northbeam was running ads to an article on the Daily Post.
- Top-level domain = northbeam.io
- 3rd party article = dailypost.com/northbeam
The flow would be the following: ad > popdust.com > ridge.com
How the data will populate in Northbeam
Conversions will be attributed to “referral: dailypost.com“ as opposed to the ad because our tracking pixel does not fire. This is an issue since we cannot see the efficacy of the ad.
Solution 1: Use Redirect URLs
The redirects send traffic to your primary domain, then redirects to the article. This allows our first-party pixel to fire, which is needed for optimal tracking.
In this case, we do not need the pixel on the article because the pixel already fires with the redirect. If the pixel is also placed on the article, the pixel could fire twice — resulting in double-counting visits, which can inflate your metrics, including visit count and CPC.
How to create Redirect URLs
Every account has a Redirect URL Guide (Menu in the top right corner > Guides > Redirect URL Guide).
It’s essentially a generator to help you easily create Redirect URLs. You’ll see it’s only available for Facebook, Pinterest, Klaviyo, and Attentive.
Solution 2: Insert Northbeam Pixel
If they’re sending traffic from a platform that doesn’t support redirects (ex. Google Ads), we can simply place the pixel on the article. The main constraint here is that we’ll be using a third-party pixel, which uses third-party cookies. This isn’t as ideal as first-party — but much better than nothing at all.
Solution 1 is ideal since it utilizes the first party pixel, but if traffic is coming from a platform that doesn’t support redirects, Solution 2 is the only option.