How postbacks work

The problem they solve

When someone clicks an affiliate link and buys something, you need to know about it. Specifically: which click led to which conversion, and which partner gets the credit. Browsers used to handle this with cookies, but cookies are unreliable — blocked by iOS, cleared by users, lost in redirects. Postbacks solve this on the server, where none of that applies.

The basic flow

Every tracking platform generates a unique click ID the moment someone clicks a link. That ID travels with the user to the offer. When a conversion happens — a purchase, a signup, a lead — the advertiser's system fires a URL back to your tracking platform carrying that click ID. Your platform sees it, matches it to the original click, records the conversion. Done.

What macros are

A postback URL looks like this:

https://track.network.com/pb?cid={transaction_id}&payout={sale_amount}

The parts in curly brackets — {transaction_id} and {sale_amount} — are macros. Placeholders. When the platform fires the postback, it replaces them with real values: the actual click ID and the actual payout amount.

Every platform has its own names for these macros. Everflow calls the click ID {transaction_id}. Voluum uses {clickid}. CAKE uses #s1# with a different bracket format entirely. Same concept, different names — which is why translation matters.

Why postbacks break

The most common failures, in rough order of frequency:

• Wrong macro name. Using {amount} in Everflow when you mean {sale_amount}. The postback fires but the value is blank.
• Wrong bracket syntax. Pasting a CAKE URL (#s1#) into Everflow, where macros use {}. The macro never substitutes.
• Missing click ID in the tracking link. If the click ID was never passed to the advertiser, they can't return it. Check the offer URL first.
• Wrong context. Some macros only work in specific URL types. Everflow's {amount} is Advertiser Postback only — it returns blank in a Partner Postback.
• URL encoding. Special characters in macro values (especially & and =) need to be encoded, or they break the URL structure.

Use this site

Every platform's macros are in the reference — the name, what it does, which URL type it works in, and any gotchas worth knowing. If you're setting up a postback between two platforms, look up the macros on the sending side and check that the names, syntax, and contexts are right before you go live.