Postbacks and reconciliation: what to set up before the first click

The most expensive conversation in media buying sounds like this: “show us which channels delivered deposits.” It happens in week three of a flight, when the budget is already spread across placements and the tracker holds nothing but clicks. There is no answer to give: an event that was not sent at the moment of the action will not appear in a report a day later, or a month later.

01What is actually sent

A postback is a request from your system to the tracker at the moment of a target action. At minimum it carries four things: the click id, the event type, the timestamp and the amount. The id ties the action to a placement, the type separates a signup from a deposit, the timestamp is needed for the attribution window, and the amount is what payback per source is calculated from.

In our reports the practical difference between “signup” and “verified signup” is measured in multiples, not percentages. On a typical Tier-3 geo, 55–65% of registered users make it through verification. If one event reaches the tracker instead of two, the cost looks twice as good and means nothing.

A separate event for the first deposit is mandatory. It decides which channel stays in the buy and which is switched off in week two. Everything before it is an intermediate step, and you cannot pay for those.

02Why reconciliation happens in week one, not the last one

Our numbers and the client’s numbers never match exactly. A 10–15% gap is normal: different time zones, different attribution windows, postback delay. A twofold discrepancy means a lost tag, and it has to be found that same Monday.

The reason is simple: the gap does not stay put, it grows. Every day without reconciliation means new placements tagged the same broken way. By the end of a six-week flight, nothing can recover which channel delivered the result: what is left is a total and guesswork.

So our first reconciliation is in the calendar for day seven, not day thirty. By then the system holds enough events to reveal a skew, and little enough money has been spent for that to be affordable.

03Three places where a tag gets lost

First, copying the link by hand. Someone takes the address from the address bar, sends it to a friend, and the friend arrives as direct traffic. In influencer buying this is not an exception but half the traffic, which is why our UTM always travels alongside a promo code, never instead of one.

Second, a redirect that drops parameters. A landing page with a language fork, a short link through a third-party service, a jump to the mobile version — parameters can fail to survive any of those hops. Checking this takes ten minutes before launch: open the live link, get to the form, look at what reached the tracker.

Third, the app. A web tag does not survive an install: between the click and the app opening sits a store that passes nothing along. Deep links and mobile attribution keys work here, and that is a separate setup, not a checkbox in the existing one.

04What we ask for before the start

The list is short and always the same: access to the tracker or a willingness to let us stand one up, agreed event names, a test postback from the live environment, and a developer contact who can respond within a day during week one.

It takes one to three days and is almost always felt as a delay before launch. In practice those three days are the only chance to learn that the “deposit” event arrives without an amount and that “signup” fires twice. A month later the same news costs a flight’s budget.