Tracking is a crucial process for receiving rewards, cashback, and discounts from online offers. It involves merchants and marketers using digital identifiers to attribute your actions, like purchases or app downloads, to the correct affiliate partner. Successful tracking ensures you receive rewards automatically. However, tracking can be disrupted by privacy settings, ad blockers, device switching, and timing issues. To ensure successful tracking, follow offer terms, disable blockers, and use the same device for transactions. If rewards are missing, verify offer completion and contact support if necessary. Some offers, such as games or finance, may have special tracking requirements.
Though you may not realize it, offer “tracking” is a big part of how you get rewarded – usually, it’s a seamless process that automatically triggers the cashback, discounts, or rewards you are expecting. Successful tracking = more and faster savings and rewards for you!
- OK, But What Exactly Is “Tracking”?
“Tracking” is how online merchants and other marketers keep track of which of their affiliate partners convinced you to buy or do something (like download and engage with an app) that they want to promote. It’s how they source your business back to the right affiliate partner to credit.
- How Does Tracking Work?
Basically, when you click an offer, a digital identifier for {{brand.name}} is attached to that click. If, for example, you then go on to buy something on a marketer’s website or install an app from that click, the tracking system sees the identifier and knows to credit us for your action, and in turn, that is the basis upon which we can reward you. Win-win!!
- What Does Tracking Do for Me?
Tracking helps you get all the cashback, discounts, and rewards you deserve, simply and easily. So long as tracking is successfully working, you will receive automatic credit from us for your qualifying activities, without the need to do anything more.
- Does Tracking Always Work?
Though offer tracking technology generally works well, there are a few different ways it can be blocked or interrupted. When that happens, we might say an offer attempt “did not track” or we “cannot confirm successful tracking” from the merchant or other marketer, and therefore we cannot credit you with cashback or other rewards. These statements can refer to a range of different issues that might interfere with successful tracking.
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What Can Mess Up Tracking?
- Privacy Settings: Strict privacy settings on your browser or phone can block tracking, as can the use of a VPN or proxy (like Private Relay on iOS).
- 3rd Party App Interference: Certain software or apps can interfere with tracking by either blocking it (e.g., “ad blockers” or “popup blockers”) or claiming their own attribution credit for your actions (e.g., competing shopping extensions like Honey or Rakuten). If these apps are enabled, they may block or interfere with our tracking without any obvious signal on your device.
- Switching Devices or Sites: Clicking on an offer on your phone and finishing the transaction on your laptop can confuse the system. So can clicking away to a competing offer or site before you have finished completing a reward activity.
- Timing Issues: Completing any offer requirements (e.g., an app install or account opening) before clicking on the offer link, or taking too long to complete required activities for offer-completion after you click.
- App Tracking Permissions: If you don't follow the instructions to allow apps to track you (especially on iPhones), app install tracking may not work.
- Failing to Follow Offer Terms: Failing to follow all required offer terms will disqualify you, which may appear to be an “untracked” attempt in our systems, since we rely on our partners to confirm your successful completion.
- How Can I Help Make Sure My Actions Track?
- Follow the Terms: Always read and strictly follow instructions regarding timing and any other offer requirements (minimum purchase, time to complete, one-time-only offer, etc.).
- Temporarily Disable Ad Blockers: When you're trying to earn rewards, turn off ad blocker extensions or software, as they can interfere with tracking.
- Check Privacy Settings: Make sure your browser/phone isn't blocking tracking or otherwise concealing your device details (e.g., via a VPN).
- Stay on One Device: Be sure to click the offer and complete the purchase or app install on the same device.
- Allow App Tracking (if prompted): On iPhones, allow apps to track if you want to earn rewards for offers that require app installs.
- Check your Account Ledger: Confirm that your initial click on the offer and any subsequent offer-completion activity is reflected there, especially for multi-goal or multi-step offers. If your initial click on the offer successfully tracked, you should see it reflected in your Visited ledger. If your other offer-completion activity successfully tracked, you should see it in your Pending ledger. If not, there is a tracking problem which will likely prevent you from earning cashback or other rewards for that offer.
- My Reward is Missing – What Now?
- Re-read the Fine Print: Make sure that you met all the offer requirements (minimum purchase, time to complete, one-time-only offer, etc.).
- Review your Account Ledger: Confirm that your initial click on the offer and any subsequent offer-completion activity is reflected there, especially for multi-goal or multi-step offers. If your initial click on the offer successfully tracked, you should see it reflected in your Visited ledger. If your other offer-completion activity successfully tracked, you should see the rewards in your Pending ledger. If not, there was a tracking problem which likely prevented you from earning cashback or other rewards for that offer.
- Contact Customer Support: If you think you should have gotten a reward but didn’t, let us know. We are always happy to help when we can. However, if we weren’t credited by the merchant or other marketer, we generally cannot issue cashback or other rewards for offer activity that did not successfully track.
- Do Any Offer Types Have Special Tracking Requirements?
Yes, if you are playing Games or trying certain Finance offers, it helps to review our dedicated tracking FAQs here:
- What if My Actions Did Not Track?
The outcome may depend on the underlying cause. For example, a settings or permissions issue on your device will likely prevent anyone from getting credit for the offer attempt (including us). Or, if you clicked on a different offer after ours, it may mean your action was “reattributed” to a different source, and you might receive credit elsewhere. Since we aren’t credited by the merchant or other marketer, we generally cannot issue cashback or other rewards for offer activity that did not successfully track.
- Why Can’t Swagbucks Just Tell Me What Went Wrong?
Swagbucks does not generally have visibility into these “attribution” decisions, which happen between the merchant or other marketer and their third-party tracking provider(s).
By understanding a little more about how this works, and following the recommended steps above, you're much more likely to get the cashback or other rewards you deserve!