Action inquiry postbacks work by updating you whenever an action inquiry in your account is opened or closed by an impact.com account user. For example, you would receive a postback if, on the Inquiries screen, you selected Create New Inquiry and filled out the form (which would create an inquiry) or if you selected Close next to an open inquiry (which would resolve the inquiry).
There are some characteristic and restriction differences between our API and our postback system that may make postbacks a preferable solution for you.
Postbacks happen in real-time. Postbacks are generated by impact.com and received by you within 15 minutes of an event happening.
Postbacks have access to more conversion data. Even if you don't see the data point you need in our UI (or our developer reference sheet) when setting up your postbacks, we likely have the data point available if you reach out to your Publisher Account Manager (or contact support).
Postbacks do not have rate limits. When you use impact.com's API, you are subject to rate limits we have placed on our system. Specifically, when using our API, you are limited to 1000 API requests for most endpoints, whereas postbacks have no such limit.
Yes! impact.com makes use of postbacks in some of our own tracking solutions. You don't need to meet any special criteria to utilize postbacks, you don't face any rate-limiting, and impact.com will continue to try to reach your server until we receive a 200 or 201 response (meaning you received the information with no issues).
When we perform maintenance of our postback system, you will be notified and postbacks will be paused. However, as soon as we complete the maintenance, we will immediately begin catching your system back up.
However, if you notice a delay with receiving postbacks, like an action was modified and you haven't received a postback in over an hour since the modification occurred, contact support.
When using postbacks, you will establish the destination to which you want the calls to be sent. Because of this, because impact.com stores the data on our back-end, and because impact.com performs a server-to-server call when we send the data, there is no way to intercept the data while it is in transit.
If you want, we can create a custom header that conveys another set of credentials to include in the postback calls impact.com sends you. You cannot create this header in the web app, so reach out to your Publisher Account Manager (or contact support) to notify us that you want this header created.