Tracking SMS Traffic with Voluum

Voluum can also serve as a tracker for SMS-based campaigns. When you include a campaign URL in your first or subsequent SMS messages, any click on this link will be tracked and counted in the same way as with standard traffic sources. Using Voluum to track SMS campaigns allows you to:

• Monitor click-through rates and conversion rates.
• Track additional visit characteristics to further optimize your campaigns, if only your SMS gateway supports it and your phone number database includes additional phone owners' characteristics, such as age or gender.

The following guide instructs you on how to set up tracking of SMS-based campaigns with Voluum.

SMS marketing can be characterized by two things:

• High open rates.

  but also

• Strict regulations.

Typically, a phone number owner has to explicitly agree (opt-in) to receive marketing communication through their phone number. If you collect phone numbers on your registration page, you are required to secure such consent. Once you do so, you can use a number of SMS gateway service providers to send high quantities of text messages in bulk. This message, either the first one or subsequent ones, will contain a destination link that will direct your visitors to a landing page or offer page. This destination link will be a Voluum campaign URL.

So the complete campaign funnel will look as follows:

1. A phone number owner receives a text message with a campaign URL.
2. A click on this links redirects them to a landing page or an offer page, according to what has been configured in Voluum.
3. Once a phone number owner converts, Voluum records an S2S postback URL send from your affiliate network that supplied the offer.

You will need the following things to track SMS traffic:

• An active Voluum account
• An offer, and optionally, a lander
• A database (usually in a CSV or Excel file formats) of phone numbers of people that have agreed (in writing) to receive marketing communication
• An SMS-gateway service that can send multiple messages at once.
• (Recommended) Access to a link-shortener service, such as Bitly, to be able to fit your campaign URL (which is usually long) in a text message.
• (Recommended) A custom domain set and CNAMEd to your Voluum dedicated domain in order not to get your dedicated domain blocked.

Once you have everything ready, you can proceed with the guide.

In order to set up tracking of SMS traffic, perform the following steps:

1. In Voluum, add an offer element.
2. Optionally, add a lander element.

3. Add a custom traffic source. Depending on your SMS-gateway service and a database you have, you may want to include some tracking parameters that will allow you to distinguish between different groups.

   For example:

   • add the genderparameter if your phone numbers' database contains information about a phone owner's gender and your SMS-gateway service provider allows you to send personalized messages.

   • add the REPLACE text as a token as a placeholder text. Because you will not be able to use dynamic tracking tokens, you will have to provide one campaign URL to your male phone number owners and another to female phone number owners. So for males, you will replace the word REPLACE in a campaign URL with the word male, and replace the word REPLACE with the word female for females.

     

4. http://voluum_dedicated_domain.com/bb24a343-851f-4065-8b58-e35e6a446770?gender=REPLACE

   Add a campaign element with the traffic source element, offer and a lander element that you have just created and copy the campaign URL to the clipboard.

   

   Your campaign URL should look like this:

5. http://voluum_dedicated_domain.com/bb24a343-851f-4065-8b58-e35e6a446770?gender=male

   http://voluum_dedicated_domain.com/bb24a343-851f-4065-8b58-e35e6a446770?gender=female

   If you want to track some phone owner's characteristics, such as gender in our example, prepare the two versions of the campaign URL:

   For males, replace the word REPLACE with male:

   For females. replace the word REPLACE with female:

   Use a link shortener to get two click-friendly links, each with information about gender.

6. In your SMS-gateway service provider, upload your phone number's database.
7. Prepare one or more types of text messages. If you follow our example of tracking a phone owner's gender, provide the shortened campaign URL for males in the message that will be sent to men and the shortened campaign URL for females in the message that will be sent to women.

Congratulations, you have successfully set up tracking of the SMS traffic.