Case: one wrong token cost a buyer 26% of his attributed conversions

Case: one wrong token cost a buyer 26% of his attributed conversions

The account: Voluum, native traffic. Buyer swore his campaigns were losing money; the network's own dashboard showed solid volume.

What we found in 20 minutes:
— The tracker's click ID was passed to the network as {clickid}
— The network's postback template expected {external_id} and silently dropped clicks whose ID it couldn't match
— 26% of confirmed network conversions never reached the tracker — the postback fired with a blank or wrong ID

The QA procedure that caught it:
1. Sent one test click end-to-end, copied the exact click ID at every stage
2. Fired a manual test postback with that ID
3. Watched the tracker conversion log — it stayed empty
4. Compared the token in the offer URL against the token in the postback template, character by character

Fix: aligned both to the same parameter name, re-ran the test, conversion landed instantly. Backfilled 14 days via the network's conversion export.

Outcome: attributed CR jumped from 2.9% to 3.9%. The campaign was profitable the whole time — the data was lying.

Match the click-ID token in the offer URL to the one in the postback template. Test with a real ID, not a placeholder.

Save this SOP. Run this before every launch.