HOQU Tech Digest #4. The HOQU Tracker. Tracing offer leads

One of the important elements of the HOQU ecosystem is the tracker. Through the tracking mechanism and the customer’s contract, HOQU ensures its full transparency.

Tracking — tracking of many different campaigns in the affiliate marketing process. For example — time, source, or number of target activities.

Thus, the key functionality of the tracker within the framework of the HOQU platform:

• Generates links in order to direct the user to the acceptor (advertiser) site and fix the transition itself.
• Tracks the user’s actions on the acceptor’s site and records events (specific user actions, for example, calls, transitions, feedback forms).
• Determines which events are leads and sends lead data to the blockchain. ( lead — the target action of a customer in response to an ad campaign: sales, order, call, register, application installation (install), etc.).

The tracker consists of two parts:

• The tracker. A software package designed to track conversions and targeted actions on the acceptor’s (advertiser’s) site.
• JavaScript code that is placed on the site acceptor (advertiser).
  Within this article, we will tell you more about the tracker, while at the same time considering the process of creating an offer and advertising campaigns for the offer in more detail.

Note: The Offer — advertising initiatives from advertisers or affiliate networks.

1. In order to start using the HOQU platform, the merchant (advertiser) must register on the platform by creating an account in the application for advertisers.

2. All offers within the platform are created by affiliate networks. So, in order for the offer to be created, the merchant needs to select a network and join it. After that, a request is sent to the network about the need to create an offer.

Note: If a merchant (advertiser) is interested in working with affiliates directly, then in this case he needs to register in the application for affiliate networks and create his own network. It is more profitable, but more difficult to implement. Also, there is a need to attract affiliates to your affiliate network.

1. At the request of the merchant, the network creates an offer.

When creating an offer, the merchant (advertiser) independently forms the parameters of one or several events that specify the user as a lead (sales, order, call, register, application installation (install), etc.). It also, determines the affiliate’s reward for the lead, as the tariff is set. The tracker will operate with predetermined tariffs to determine the lead.

Note: Reward amounts are determined in HOQU Platform tokens (HQX). A reward can have a fixed value, or it may be calculated as a percentage of the value of an attracted lead. It is also possible to fix the cost of a lead to any fiat currency. In this case, the value of a lead will be calculated in HQX tokens at the internal exchange rate current at the moment the lead was created on the hoqu.com web service.

✅ The offer may include several tariffs for different types of user actions (example on the offer).

✅ One rate corresponds to one user action.

When creating an offer, the merchant can additionally set a hold time for the leads attracted under this offer. The hold time is a period after which the lead will automatically receive the “done” status if it is not rejected by the merchant (advertiser) before that date.

1. After the offer has been created, it will be displayed in the merchant’s account in the “Pending offers” section.

In order for the offer to become available to the affiliates, the merchant (advertiser) needs to confirm the offer, while giving permission to write off the tokens as payment for attracted leads from his wallet with the HOQU Transactor Smart-Contract.

The HOQU platform will provide an indication of the presence of the tracker code on the target site. The merchant will not be able to activate the offer if there is no code on the site.

1. After confirmation, the offer becomes available to affiliates to work with, and affiliates have the opportunity to create an advertising campaign (program) for this offer.

Each affiliate (webmaster) generates a unique link (or links) when creating an offer campaign, which will later be accepted by the tracker. The link leads to the advertiser’s site (i.e. each affiliate places its unique link to attract the target user to the site).

At the same time, the tracker generates a unique link for each of the types of advertising materials provided within the campaign. (example)

Thus, the tracker will record all user actions on the site, determining:

• advertising campaign to which this action relates (in other words, determining which affiliate attracted the user);
• which of the promotional materials was the source of these actions.

When the target user follows the link, a session is generated. The code on the acceptor site confirms this session and records information about the transition, relating it to a specific advertising campaign. From the moment of the transition, the cookie’s lifetime begins to count down, and if the user re-enters the site again during the cookie’s lifetime, the user’s actions will be assigned to the last session.

For each target action, information about it is sent to the tracker. If the action is paid, the tracker creates a lead on the blockchain.

Which actions need to be fixed and which of them are the target tracker is determined based on the tariffs created in the offer. When creating a lead, information about the distribution of funds according to the tracker settings is written into it. This information will be available to all participants of the HOQU platform.

Fig. 1. Information about the distribution of funds between intermediaries and a affiliate, recorded in the tracker.

Note: Also, when an affiliate (webmaster) creates a new advertising campaign, a HOQU AdCompaign smart contract is created. A separate Smart Contract is a contract between an affiliate and a merchant.
More information about smart contracts of the HOQU platform can be found in this article https://steemit.com/hoqu/@hoqu/the-hoqu-project-october-digest

1. When the tracker fixes a lead, it enters the blockchain with the pending status.

In order for the smart contract to accrue tokens to the affiliate for the lead attracted by it, the merchant must confirm this lead.

Fig. 2. Displays leads in the “Leads” section. Leads have different statuses.

Lead confirmation can be done manually or automatically.

As was already written earlier, the lead will be confirmed automatically if the merchant (advertiser) set the hold time when creating the offer — the period after which the lead will automatically receive the “done” status, provided that it was not rejected.

When the lead status changes to “done”, the merchant is automatically deducted HQX and the HQX are credited to the affiliate (webmaster) and intermediaries (the intermediaries are defined in the tracker).

Note: Intermediaries are those who participate in the distribution of tokens for the sale of a lead. One of the middlemen is the platform itself, which charges 0.5% of tokens per transaction.
As a second intermediary may be a network. The set of resellers depends on the selected tariff and is visible when creating a campaign.
Intermediaries are stored in the lead, fixed at the time of creation of the lead and taken from the tariff settings for which the program was created. The tariff remains unchanged.

At the moment, the HOQU team continues to work on the final version of the applications for the advertisers and affiliates, including modifying the functionality of the tracker. However, the opportunity to get acquainted with the key functionality of these applications is already available to everyone in the beta version of the login.hoqu.com platform.

Also, active work is underway to create a beta version of the application for affiliate networks, which is scheduled for release in December.

We are grateful for your interest in our project and we will be happy to receive any feedback.

Respectfully,

The HOQU Team