How to fix it #8: How to read the traffic log

When users see that streams and filters in a campaign work incorrectly or not as has been configured, it will be very useful to refer to the traffic log. Today we will tell you how to read and understand this log correctly.

Understanding the log helps to find out why the click got to this or that stream, and to resolve issues such as:

  • the visitor gets white, not money page;
  • the visitor sees the blank white screen;
  • the click goes to the wrong stream.

There are two traffic logs in the tracker.
Global – writes logs of all incoming clicks to the tracker and is located in the Maintenance – Logs – Traffic menu.

And a local log of campaign clicks, which displays clicks of only one campaign. This log is located in the campaign itself – the Log button above the streams.

And now we will describe line by line what can be found in this log.

Starting pipeline – the beginning of the click’s path.

Possible IP headers shows all possible click headers and ip-addresses that can be read from these headers. The IPs may differ when the visitor uses proxy or vpn.

Requested will show an URL which launched the campaign. Here you can also see which parameters were substituted into the link in the advertising network, and which of them came empty.

Param alias matched describes which parameters have been substituted and where in Keitaro report you can find them

Searching campaign – Keitaro looks for the campaign to execute based on the URL required.

Processing campaign 8 shows the ID of the launched campaign.

Checking stream shows which stream is currently being checked, the tracker determines with filters whether a click can go to this stream. The stream ID (number) can be found by hovering the cursor over the stream name or by collapsing the campaign settings on the right.

All filters are checked indicates that all filters have been passed, and the click will remain on the stream. The stream number will be indicated in the Checking stream line.

Blocks by filter “bot”. Not passed. shows that the click did not pass the Bot filter. The filter name can be different depending on which one you are using.

If the click does not get to the first stream, it goes to the next one, and filters are checked again until the click is on the allowed stream.

Passed. Checking the schema and action. The click got to the stream. In this part, the tracker checks what settings are in the schema tab, and what needs to be done with a click in this stream – either to show a landing page, an offer, or perform a redirect or some action.

Saving clicks: 1 the click is saved to the database.

[Pipeline execution time] – how much time did it take to process this click.

User info: in this part you can see all the information that Keitaro received from the browser about the click – subid, IP, UserAgent, language, country, city, region, browser, connection type, etc.

It will be very useful to read our article on how filters and streams work.

In case you checked all the steps above but couldn’t solve the issue, reach out to our support team, we will be happy to help out.