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Technology and tracking

Heartbeat

Also called heartbeat signal, heartbeat monitoring, liveness check, tracking health check.

Short answer

A heartbeat is a regular sign of life that a system or script sends to show it is still running. In affiliate tracking, heartbeat monitoring is used to detect that a store’s tracking has stopped sending data before the loss of conversions grows.

Definition of Heartbeat.

The principle is the reverse of ordinary error handling: instead of waiting for an error message, you monitor the absence of a signal. A script that has been removed from the page sends nothing – not even an error. The heartbeat is sent at fixed intervals, and if it fails to arrive beyond a threshold, an alert is triggered.

In affiliate tracking, silent failures are the expensive kind. A theme update, a new consent banner or a developer tidying up scripts can stop conversion recording while the store and the traffic carry on as normal. Clicks are still registered on the tracking link, but the sales are never reported – and without monitoring, the first symptom is an affiliate asking where their commission went.

A tracking heartbeat is different from uptime monitoring of the store itself. The site can respond flawlessly while the tracking script is gone – the two fail independently of each other. Monitoring therefore has to measure what actually needs to work: that the script loads and reports back from the store’s pages.

How it goes wrong

  • 01

    The site is up, so tracking must work

    Uptime and tracking are separate points of failure. A store can respond perfectly to every page request while its tracking script has been gone for weeks.

  • 02

    The failure is only discovered at settlement

    Without a heartbeat, a dead script is typically discovered when an affiliate misses their commissions. By then, attribution for the sales in between is lost and cannot be recovered.

  • 03

    Mistaking a sign of life for a correct setup

    A heartbeat shows that the script is running – not that conversions are being recorded correctly. Zero conversions from a live script can still be a configuration error.

At Affilyflow

Heartbeat in practice

Affilyflow monitors on its own whether the store’s tracking script is down and lets you know, so an outage does not have to be discovered by a puzzled affiliate. Every tracking event is also logged – including those that did not become a sale – so a gap in the data stream can be seen and pinned to a point in time.

Frequently asked questions

How do you detect that a tracking script has stopped working?

By monitoring the absence of a signal rather than waiting for errors. The script sends a regular heartbeat, and if it fails to arrive beyond a threshold, an alert is triggered. A removed script sends no error message – it sends nothing at all.

Why do affiliates lose commission when tracking is down?

The click is still registered via the tracking link, but the conversion on the store’s side is never reported. The sale exists in the store’s order system, but without the event it cannot be linked to the click, and no commission is triggered.

Isn’t uptime monitoring enough?

No. Uptime measures whether the site responds – not whether the tracking script loads. The two fail independently of each other, so a store can be up for months while its tracking is dead.

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