Postback QA — 7-point pre-launch checklist

Postback QA — 7-point pre-launch checklist

Run this before you point a single dollar of traffic at a new offer. A silent postback failure burns budget invisibly.

— Fire a test conversion from the network's postback tester. Confirm a row lands in your tracker within 60 seconds.
— Verify click_id token matches exactly: Voluum uses cid, Keitaro uses subid. A mismatch returns 200 OK but logs nothing.
— Check the payout token {payout} populates a real number, not 0.00 or blank.
— Confirm the status token maps correctly: lead vs sale vs reject. Map all three, not just sale.
— Inspect the HTTP response in your tracker log. 200 with empty body is a fail, not a pass.
— Test a duplicate postback. Confirm dedup logic rejects the second hit by click_id.
— Send a conversion with an unknown click_id. It must be logged as orphan, not silently dropped.

If any point fails, do not launch. A postback that returns 200 but records nothing is the most expensive bug in performance marketing.

Save this SOP. Run this before every launch.