Insights
No trend pieces. These are the arguments we have with advertisers and publishers every week, written down so we can stop having them from scratch.
Overview
Insights is the Performetra working notebook: the unit economics of setting a CPA payout, the six fraud patterns worth screening for, why cash-on-delivery breaks standard affiliate commissions, and why server-to-server postbacks beat pixels. Each article exists because a live campaign forced the question.
The applied versions live elsewhere on the site — pricing method inside how advertisers work with us, fraud controls on the technology page, and COD structures in e-commerce campaigns.
At a glance
Five abbreviations decide how every performance campaign is billed. Here is what each one means, pays for, and quietly assumes.
Every list of "best affiliate networks in India" is written by someone on the list. Here is the evaluation method instead — it works on us too.
One is a category, the other is a pricing discipline. Confusing them is how budgets end up measured by what is easy instead of what matters.
Installs are a procurement problem. Users are a strategy problem. Most UA plans fail by solving the first and reporting it as the second.
Loan leads are the most bought and worst bought commodity in Indian fintech. The difference is five contract clauses most buyers never ask for.
Indore has quietly become a real performance marketing hub. Here is how to evaluate anyone in the city — including us.
Most unprofitable performance campaigns were unprofitable on the day the payout was agreed. Here is the arithmetic that prevents it.
Every fraud pattern leaves a signature in data you already have. The problem is that nobody is looking at it until the invoice arrives.
A 6% commission on placed orders can be a 9% commission on delivered ones. Whether that matters depends entirely on your RTO rate.
A pixel asks a browser to report a sale. A postback asks your server. Only one of those has an incentive to be honest.
Reading paths
Ten articles is enough to get lost in. Three guided sequences, each ending at the decision the reading was for.
Start with performance vs digital marketing to place outcome pricing in your budget, then how to price a CPA offer to set a payout that survives scale, and finish with how to choose a network — five questions that expose any vendor, including us. Selling online with COD? Add the delivered-order commission argument before you sign anything.
The user acquisition strategy guide is the spine: channel layers, budget split, retention gates. Pair it with the six fraud patterns so install fraud is a budget line you refuse to fund, and the pricing-model glossary to plan the CPI-to-CPA migration with your network.
Read S2S postback vs pixel first — it settles the architecture argument in one sitting. Then the fraud patterns article for the checks worth automating, and the technology page for the integration spec your engineers will actually implement. Lenders should end on the loan lead buying guide — five contract clauses that do the compliance work for you.
Every article here came out of a live campaign argument. When one of them matches an argument you are currently having, skip to the applied version.
How this is written
Three rules govern everything published here. First, every claim traces to something we have run: a payout structure that survived reconciliation, a fraud pattern caught in a real quarantine queue, a reversal window negotiated in a real insertion order. Nothing is aggregated from other blogs. Second, numbers are ranges with conditions attached, because a universal benchmark in performance marketing is almost always a lie with confident formatting. Where we quote a contact rate or an RTO band, the paragraph says what it depends on. Third, the advice must work even if you never contact us. A pricing method that only functions inside our network is not a method, it is a pitch — and readers can tell the difference faster than most publishers think.
Articles are reviewed when the mechanics change — a platform policy, an attribution shift, a regulation — rather than rewritten on a calendar to look fresh. The published date is the honest one. If something here has gone stale and we have not caught it, tell us and it gets fixed with a note, not silently.
Next step
Everything here comes out of live campaigns. If you would rather have it applied to yours, start with one conversion event and a payout question.
