readme.txt

=== ClickerVolt - Affiliate Links & Click Tracking for Performance Marketers ===
Contributors: clickervolt, freemius
Tags: affiliate, affiliate link management, link, link cloaker, link redirect, affiliate links, click tracking, link tracking, shortlink, url, page cloaker, cloaker, cloaking, redirect, redirection, drilldown, stats, statistics, marketing, aida
Requires at least: 4.9
Tested up to: 5.9
Requires PHP: 7.1
Stable tag: trunk
License: GPLv3
License URI: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html

Advanced affiliate link cloaking and click tracking. ClickerVolt is used for tracking affiliate campaigns performance.

== Description ==
All ClickerVolt features are available in the FREE version. Support is only available as a paid option.

[ClickerVolt](https://clickervolt.com/) is a tool used by affiliates who want to know everything about their visitors and their affiliate marketing campaigns performance. It is the perfect link tracking plugin for anyone running paid traffic campaigns, be it solo ads, pay-per-click, native, push, pop, you name it! It is also an amazing tool to track who clicks your affiliate links, in your blog posts, in your Facebook groups, Twitter feeds, Instagram, emails or any other medium.

Whenever a visitor clicks one of your links, you are immediately able to find out:

* His location (country tier, country, region, city, zip code, timezone)
* His language
* His ISP
* His IP address
* His device type, device brand, device name, browser, OS
* Which site he is coming from
* As well as any custom variable you may have added to your link

It also allows you to track your conversions/revenue, either by placing a conversion pixel on your thank you pages, or by giving a custom s2s (server-to-server) postback URL to your affiliate networks.

For those of you running paid traffic, you can also track your cost and ROI.

Not only that, you are also able to route your traffic to different pages based on rules you setup. For example, you could send all Spanish-speaking visitors to a page, all Chinese-speaking ones to another page, and the rest to a fallback page.

You can setup rules based on:

* Your visitor's location (country, region, city)
* Your visitor's language
* Your visitor's ISP
* Your visitor's IP address
* His browser's user agent
* Device type, device brand, device name
* Browser or OS
* or based on the current date, day of the week, hour of the day
* based on specific words in the URL, or values of specific query parameters
* or based on which site referred the visitor
* and more...

You can split-test URLs (with weighted rotators) to find the best performing ones, you can cloak your links, you can track the click-through-rate of your offer links from your landing pages, you can track complex flows and non-linear affiliate and sales funnels, you can trigger your retargeting pixels whenever someone clicks one of your links and so much more!

To analyze your stats, ClickerVolt gives you access to:

* A feature-rich drilldown reporting system, allowing you to dissect and analyze your traffic in a tree table
* A live clicks-log to see all traffic coming in real time
* Integration with Google's AI to detect bots, fraud and suspicious traffic 

ClickerVolt is a dream-come-true tracker for affiliates. It is a premium link tracking software which we decided to release for free.

[Check the video tour on our website](https://clickervolt.com/#video-tour)

== Similar Affiliate Software ==

ClickerVolt is similar to popular tracking software like CPV Lab PRO, ClickMagick, Voluum (Codewise's Voluum Tracking), Bemob, RedTrack, ClickMeter, FunnelFlux, Kintura, Adsbridge or Binom.

All these other software come with recurring subscriptions and expensive pricing. We initially wanted to sell ClickerVolt too (and we actually did sell it to a small base of affiliates) - but we then decided to go with another model:

Make the product 100% free, with all the features one would expect from a premium paid tracking solution, and sell platinum addons for advanced use cases.

At this time, only two add-ons are available:

1: Support - which is given by experienced and successful affiliates, who speak the language and understand the needs of performance marketers.
2: Voltify Takeover - a way to completely take over remote pages and change any data on the fly ([examples here](https://doc.clickervolt.com/clickervolt-add-ons/voltify-takeover-redirect-mode)).

Example of add-ons we plan to release:

* Traffic source integrations - allowing you to create paid traffic campaigns from your ClickerVolt dashboard, pause placements or change bids automatically based on your own optimization rules.
* Auto replacement of blog links with "ghost" tracking links (invisible affiliate links - very important for Amazon affiliates as Amazon forbid the use of redirect links)

Paid users are also prioritized when it comes to feature requests.

== Affiliate Networks ==

ClickerVolt helps you promote offers from popular CPA or traditional affiliate networks, like MaxBounty, Peerfly, A4D, C2M, CPAWay, Clickbank etc. All these networks allow you to append a unique tracking ID to your affiliate links. ClickerVolt automates this by the use of its clickid [cid] token. You can then give your ClickerVolt postback URL to these networks to receive conversion notifications in realtime.

== Traffic Sources ==

ClickerVolt works with all major traffic sources: 

* Facebook Ads
* Google Ads (previously known as Google Adwords)
* Bing Ads
* ZeroPark
* AdMaven
* MegaPush
* PopAds
* Content.Ad
* MGID
* Taboola
* Outbrain
* etc...

ClickerVolt works with the new Google Ads and Microsoft Ads parallel tracking out of the box. It is actually one of the only trackers working with parallel tracking.

== AIDA Metrics: Our Unique Selling Point ==

FREE is never enough. In addition to all the features above, we have a feature that no other tracker has. 

A feature mainly for affiliates paying for their traffic, but not only. A feature that will save you both time and money.

Before telling you what this feature is, let me start by telling you what the problem is - let's illustrate it with the following example:

You are running a PPC campaign and you are bidding on 3 different keywords:

* keyword 1
* keyword 2
* keyword 3

Your are advertising a product making you $30 per sale.

You do not know yet if any of these 3 keywords will be profitable or not, so you need to test each of them. 

After spending $40 (and not one single sale yet), you look at your PPC dashboard, and you see this:

* keyword 1 - spent $15
* keyword 2 - spent $10
* keyword 3 - spent $15

At this point, any of these keywords still remains a good candidate. You don't know, maybe after spending five more dollars on keyword 3, you will get your first sale. That would make a spend of $20 for keyword 3 and a revenue of $30 - netting you $10. Likewise, you could still make a sale from keywords 1 and 2 before spending $30 on each of them, making them all profitable.

But the point is: this testing phase, that we usually call the optimization phase, is extremely expensive.

If you had 100 keywords (and it's easy to reach), you would have to spend at least $30 (your offer payout) on each single one of them before deciding wether to cut it or to keep it. 100 * $30 = $3,000 for the optimization phase.

There must be a better way... 

And yes, there is! It's called AIDA tracking.

ClickerVolt is the only affiliate tracking software integrating AIDA in all its reports, making the optimization phase much faster, and way less expensive.

[Check the AIDA case study on our website](https://clickervolt.com/case-study/)

== Performance ==

You should care about speed. Speed matters.

Amazon, Google and others tell you that faster page loads directly correlate to increased ROI.

This is why you should never use a slow link tracking software.

ClickerVolt is faster than the next best tracker, and we have benchmarks to prove it.

[Check the benchmarks on our website](https://clickervolt.com/benchmarks/)

== Alternative Link Tracking Plugins ==

If you only need basic shortlink management, the following URL shorteners may be a better fit for you:

* [Shortlinks by Pretty Links](https://wordpress.org/plugins/pretty-link/)
* [Easy Affiliate Links](https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-affiliate-links/)
* [ThirstyAffiliates Affiliate Link Manager](https://wordpress.org/plugins/thirstyaffiliates/)

However, if you'd like the fastest possible redirects, and the best tracking in town, then ClickerVolt is your tool!

== Integration with the following traffic sources

* Google Ads (Adwords) - including Parallel Tracking [(See Tutorial)](https://doc.clickervolt.com/third-party-setups/creating-a-google-ads-campaign)
* Microsoft Ads (Bing Ads) [(See Tutorial)](https://doc.clickervolt.com/third-party-setups/creating-a-microsoft-ads-bing-ads-campaign)
* Facebook Ads
* MegaPush
* RichPush
* Pushground
* Zeropark
* Widget Media
* Traffic Stars
* Taboola
* Self Advertiser
* RevContent
* PropellerAds
* PopCash
* PopAds
* Outbrain
* MGID
* Avazu
* AdCash
* AdMaven
* ezMob

== Integration with the following affiliate networks

* A4D
* ActionAds
* AdCombo
* Addiliate
* Adsimilis
* AdsUp
* Affiliaxe
* Affise
* AIVIX
* Awin
* BeeOption
* Big Bang Ads
* BillyMob
* BitterStrawberry
* BlackFox
* C2M
* Cash Network
* CJ
* Clickbank [(See Tutorial)](https://doc.clickervolt.com/third-party-setups/tracking-clickbank-affiliate-conversions)
* Clickbooth
* Clickdealer
* CPALead
* CPAWay
* CrackRevenue
* Creative Clicks
* Digistore24
* Dr.Cash
* Everad
* Everflow
* ExpertMobi
* Generic - Cake
* Generic - HasOffers
* GiddyUp
* Global Wide Media
* LeadBit
* LetsCPA
* Los Pollos
* LuckyOnline
* M4trix.digital
* Magic Hygeia
* Market Health
* MaxBounty
* MaxWeb
* Mobidea
* Mobidealer
* Mobipium
* MobVista
* Shareasale
* SpicyOffers
* Tapgerine
* ToroAdvertising
* Traffic Company
* Verve Direct (DFO)
* W4
* WapEmpire
* WarriorPlus via IPN
* Yep Ads
* YTZ
* Zorka.Mobi

== Installation ==
Upload and activate! 

Note that ClickerVolt is extremely light on resources - it can run on shared hosting without any issue if you do not plan to send more than a few thousand visitors to your campaigns every day.

For high traffic campaigns, we recommend using a VPS or dedicated server.

== Frequently Asked Questions ==

= Why should I choose ClickerVolt instead of another tracker? =

ClickerVolt is already great to use, but we are working hard to make it even better and the go-to-tracker platform for affiliates. We believe we will reach our goal very soon for a few reasons: 

1. It's very fast! The user panel is a pleasure to use as there is no page-load at all to access all ClickerVolt features. Plus, as you can see in [our benchmarks](https://clickervolt.com/benchmarks/), redirects take less than 1ms of click-processing time, which is way faster than other trackers (speed matters for conversions!)

2. It's easy to install and update - it's a WordPress plugin so no technical knowledge required

3. It's the only tracker integrating AIDA in its reports, which makes optimizing your campaigns much faster than with other trackers.

4. It's one of the only trackers allowing you to build unlimited depth funnels (with multiple landers and offers in the same funnel)

5. It's built by successful affiliates for affiliates. We know what affiliates need - and we are open to your features request.

= Do you have an affiliate program? =

Yes, we do! Install the plugin and click on the "affiliation" menu to start promoting ClickerVolt. You can earn monthly/yearly/lifetime commissions.



== Screenshots ==
1. Basic settings
2. Drilldown reports
3. Live clicks log
4. Redirect rules
5. Custom PHP and Html/JS hooks (like retargeting pixels)
6. Traffic Source tokens

== Changelog ==
= 1.168 =
* ClickerVolt is live again - the family is continuing the project with me (we need help for managing support)
* Compatible with Wordpress 5.7
* Added JVZoo IPN
* In reports, the visits percentage of children rows is now based on unique clicks instead of raw clicks
* The session ID is now appended to all final URLs to fix the issues caused by cookie blocking
* Updated device detection API

= 1.167 =
* Updated device detection API

= 1.166 =
* Added template for Awin affiliate network
* Added support for vendors' sales notifications in WarriorPlus IPN
* Added [geo-country-code] dynamic token
* Added [session] dynamic token for email marketers. A session can be restored by appending session=XXX to your tracking links, where XXX is the session value returned by [session]
* Added handling of parallel tracking for Microsoft Ads traffic (you must enable auto-tagging in your MS Ads account: https://help.ads.microsoft.com/#apex/3/en/60000/2)

= 1.163 =
* All dynamic tokens such as [geo-country] can now be used in HTML/Javascript and PHP hooks
* The AIDA script now loads a minified version of cvTrack.js (for faster loading)
* Removed PayKickstart affiliate network support (their IPN doesn't pass the cid back to the IPN URL)
* Updated device detection API

= 1.162 =
* Added conversion IPN for PayKickstart affiliate network
* Added conversion IPN for WarriorPlus affiliate network

= 1.160 =
* Fixed mixed content ajax errors on some configurations
* Updated device detection API

= 1.158 =
* Added action type and action name columns in live clicks log (hidden by default)
* Improved maxmind files downloader
* Fixed plugin icon

= 1.157 =
* Added mobile-friendly tooltips on long segment texts

= 1.156 =
* Fixed long html sequence shown in reports when segmenting by source plus 2 other segments
* Updated device detection API
* Added template for Market Health affiliate network
* Added default fraud detection mode in settings tab
* Added purge options in settings tab

= 1.155 =
* Fixed conversion pixel not triggering when used on pages not defined in target URLs

= 1.154 =
* Added redirect rule to test traffic source
* Added redirect rules to test source vars from v1 to v10
* Added source template for ezMob
* Updated device detection API

= 1.152 =
* Improved maxmind databases downloader

= 1.151 =
* Added templates for YTZ and MaxWeb affiliate networks

= 1.150 =
* Added EPC/CPC columns in stat tables (hidden by default, click the column visibility button to toggle)
* Added templates for CPALead, Creative Clicks and Digistore24 affiliate networks

= 1.149 =
* Fixed misalignment of values in reports' "totals" row 

= 1.148 =
* Fixed infinite loading on link report icon

= 1.147 =
* Added custom reports (in reports tab)
* Fixed potential security issue (javascript injection in query parameters v1 to v10)
* Fixed template for shareasale affiliate network
* Minor UI changes based on WordPress 5.3 design

= 1.145 =
* Updated device detection API
* Fixed broken icons in live view for some exotic browsers

= 1.144 =
* Fixed conversions not recorded when conversion amount is 0 (like email subscribers for example)

= 1.143 =
* Fixed issue with Cheetah Browser wrongly detected as Liebao

= 1.142 =
* Fixed issue with URL distributions where URLs with a weight of 0 could still be selected
* Improved parallel id tracking (Google Ads)
* Updated device detection API
* Added icons in live view for missing browsers

= 1.137 =
* Organic views of multiple URLs of the same slug now keep the initial source and v1-v10 values
* Added support for tracking "tel:" links
* Added source template for Pushground
* Added affiliate network template for Verve Direct (DFO)

= 1.136 =
* Fixed organic tracking

= 1.135 =
* Updated device detection API
* Improved rules router for region/city names with non-ascii chars

= 1.132 =
* Fixed bug in parallel ids processing (Google Ads) when parallel request came after the visitor request
* Added affiliate network templates for Traffic Company and Mobipium

= 1.131 =
* Updated GiddyUp network template as they moved from Cake to Everflow client
* Added Yep Ads network template
* Added Big Bang Ads network template

= 1.130 =
* Added template for SpicyOffers affiliate network
* Updated source template for FB Ads
* The new advanced fraud detection detects even more bots (only after you update the AIDA script on your landers if you're not using the Cloaked redirect)
* Some UI fixes

= 1.127 =
* Fixed issue with old links not loading in some cases
* Updated PopAds tokens in default source template
* Updated suspicious traffic buckets
* Putting the mouse over the suspicious traffic bar in reports now shows 2 decimal places for the suspicious rate

= 1.126 =
* Added new "suspicious" related segments in reporting tab

= 1.125 =
* Removed Peerfly affiliate network template (they stopped business)
* Moved reCaptcha V3 settings within link settings (under the new "Fraud Detection" tab)
* Implemented advanced fraud detection mode (under the new "Fraud Detection" tab)

= 1.123 =
* Added "Aggregated Links" option in reports tab to group stats for all links together
* "Expand All" now shows a warning when trying to expand too many rows at once

= 1.119 =
* Added slug validation against posts/pages to prevent conflicts
* Added new external-id option for tracking URL query parameters, with corresponding [external-id] dynamic token
* Clicking 'refresh' button in links/reports tabs now forces clicks queue to be processed immediately
* Changed slug maximum length from 40 to 128 chars
* Added new affiliate network template for ToroAdvertising
* Updated Peerfly affiliate network template (they changed their tokens)
* Fixed bug introduced in latest version generating corrupted AIDA scripts
* Fixed cron issues

= 1.116 =
* Added cloaking options when selecting the cloaked redirect mode 
* Moved link slug input under link's basic-settings tab
* Removed template of AboveAllOffers affiliate network (they stopped business)

= 1.115 =
* Fixed issue with Google Ads parallel tracking combined with CNAMEd domains
* Fixed issue with cloaked pages used on CNAMEd domains
* Added traffic source template for YouTube ads
* Optimized live clicks log for high traffic

= 1.110 =
* Added fixed header to links/reports/live-clicks tables
* Added totals at the bottom of links and reports tables

= 1.108 =
* Fixed bricked dashboard in some cases

= 1.107 =
* Live clicks log now shows dates in local time instead of UTC
* Added 3 new affiliate network templates

= 1.106 =
* Added default templates for 19 traffic sources
* Added default templates for 44 affiliate networks

= 1.103 =
* Fixed output buffering issue happening on some servers

= 1.102 =
* Added IP detection setting for Hostgator servers and similar hosting companies
* Fixed live clicks log when database tables prefix is different from 'wp_'
* Fixed maxmind dbs not found when other plugins use maxmind reader too

= 1.101 =
* Moved maxmind dbs to external data folder, to prevent files from being deleted during plugin updates

= 1.098 =
* ClickerVolt becomes free! All features are available in the free version, but support is a paid option.

= 1.096 =
* Added suspicious traffic score by using Google's AI (their invisible reCAPTCHA v3 - you must set it up first in the new 'Settings' tab)
* Fixed stats aggregation bug for the 'URL' segment
* Fixed wrong sorting on "clicks" column
* Minor UI improvements

= 1.091 =
* Visitors are now recognized by IP/UserAgent/Language combination
* HTML/JS Hooks can now be executed after a redirect has completed. This is extremely powerful as it allows to execute custom Javascript on any page, even if not yours
* Hooks are now executed for organic views too!

= 1.081
* Improved tracking of organic views with real time display in live clicks log (you need to place the new AIDA script on your page to get the improvements)

= 1.08 =
* Added tracking of organic views (integrated in the AIDA script)
* Added optional 'url' query parameter to tracking links to force the destination URL
* Added better detection of proxy-forwarded IPs
* Added [device-language] dynamic token
* Added CTR display for all childs in tree reports

= 1.071 =
* Fixed broken table sorting
* Optimized heatmap generation for faster reports

= 1.07 =
* Added redirect rules in link settings
* Fixed bug: backslash was added in front of single quotes in custom redirect hooks

= 1.06 =
* Added 'Live Clicks' tab to see clicks coming in real time

= 1.05 =
* Added optional redirect hooks (for example to add your retargeting pixels)
* Added slug aliases, which work like link synonyms

= 1.04 =
* Improved AIDA tracking script
* Added automatic support of Google Ads parallel tracking (no config required)

= 1.03 =
* Added variable editor in Conversion Pixels tab
* Shortened default variable names of postback URL (keeping compatibility with existing ones)