What a TDS does with a click
When someone clicks a link on your domain, the TDS handles the request in four steps.
- Identify. It reads the visitor’s country, city, ISP, device, operating system, browser, language and referrer.
- Filter. It decides whether the visit looks like a person or a bot. See bot traffic.
- Route. It goes through your rules from top to bottom. The first matching rule picks the destination; everyone else goes to the main URL.
- Record. It writes the click to a log with the reason for each decision, so you can see where traffic went and why.
You change the routing in the dashboard. The link you put in your ads stays the same.
Why affiliates use one
- Send each audience to the right offer. US mobile visitors to one offer, desktop to another, everyone else to a fallback.
- Keep bots out of your funnel. Scanners and crawlers use up budget and distort statistics.
- Change a destination without touching the ads. Swap an offer in one place instead of editing every campaign.
- Test offers and pages. Split traffic between URLs and compare results. See split test.
TDS vs tracker
A TDS focuses on routing and filtering. A tracker focuses on attribution: it ties a click to a conversion and reports revenue, cost and ROI. Both jobs start with a click, so they overlap. TDS.SO covers both: links route by rules, and with the tracker on, postbacks from the affiliate network are matched to clicks. The tracker is in beta.
How TDS.SO is built
Rules, filtering, the click log and statistics run in the cloud. On your side there is a lightweight proxy on a VPS, installed with one command, and the domains you point at it. Rules offer 20+ conditions and 10+ redirect methods. To set up a first link, follow the first-launch guide; details are under redirects and traffic filtering.
Questions
What does TDS stand for?
Traffic distribution system. In affiliate marketing it is a service that routes clicks to different destinations by rules and filters unwanted traffic.
Is a TDS the same as a tracker?
No, they do different jobs. A TDS routes and filters clicks, a tracker ties conversions to clicks and calculates revenue and ROI. TDS.SO has both, and the tracker is in beta.
Do I need my own server to use TDS.SO?
Yes, a small VPS that runs a lightweight proxy for your domains. The proxy installs with one command, and rules, filtering and statistics live in the cloud.