For many carriers, monetising tracking pages looks straightforward on paper. The traffic is large, repeat, and high-intent. The revenue opportunity is real.
But in practice, most carriers face the same hard constraint:
They cannot afford to show the wrong offers.
HubEurope is a good example of why.
A Common Goal: Monetise Without Harming Experience
HubEurope is a UK carrier processing millions of orders per year.
Like many logistics companies, their goal was simple: use their own tracking traffic to generate incremental revenue — without harming the customer experience or damaging relationships with their shipper clients.
On the surface, programmatic advertising seemed like the obvious route. Plug in an ad platform, let it fill the space, and collect the revenue.
But that’s where the problem appeared.
The Conflict: Merchants vs. Offers
HubEurope’s merchants sell products across a wide range of categories:
- Fashion
- Electronics
- Home goods
- Subscriptions
- Marketplaces
Programmatic platforms are designed to optimise for:
- Highest bidder
- Highest predicted CTR
- Broadest demand
They do not optimise for:
- Merchant sensitivity
- Category conflicts
- Commercial relationships
That creates a direct risk.
A tracking page for a fashion retailer could show:
- Competing fashion brands
- Discount marketplaces
- Subscription offers that undercut the merchant
- Generic shopping ads unrelated to the original purchase
From the merchant’s perspective, this looks like their own carrier advertising competitors to their customers.
As Chris Bee, CEO of HubEurope, puts it:
“Without offer filtering, we couldn’t risk showing competing offers on the tracking pages of our clients.”
— Chris Bee, CEO at HubEurope
When Revenue Conflicts with Trust
For HubEurope, this created a simple but serious trade-off:
Is the advertising revenue worth the risk of losing shipper clients?
In theory, the revenue was attractive.
In reality:
- Even a small number of complaints from merchants could jeopardise contracts
- Trust with shippers mattered more than short-term ad yield
- The downside risk outweighed the upside
So HubEurope made a rational decision:
They chose not to monetise at all.
Not because the opportunity was bad — but because the risk of showing the wrong offers was too high.
This Is the Real Bottleneck in Tracking Page Monetisation
Most people assume the challenge is:
- Traffic volume
- User intent
- Ad demand
In practice, the real bottleneck is: control.
Specifically:
- Control over categories
- Control over competing brands
- Control over merchant conflicts
- Control over the user experience
Without Extreme Caution Filtering, monetisation forces carriers into an impossible position:
either
- accept blind programmatic risk
or - walk away from the revenue entirely
Many choose the second option.
How Extreme Caution Filtering Changes the Equation
Extreme Caution Filtering doesn’t just improve performance.
It makes monetisation viable at all.
With Extreme Caution Filtering, a carrier can:
- Exclude competing retailers
- Block sensitive categories
- Prevent merchant conflicts
- Preserve trust with both merchants and consumers
This turns monetisation from: “Are we willing to take this risk?” into: “How do we design this safely?”
That is a fundamentally different question.
How HubEurope Solved This
HubEurope ultimately chose to monetise their tracking pages only once they could fully control what appeared on them.
They now use Extreme Caution Filtering through Groovy.
Groovy’s system blocks offers with:
- Brand conflicts
- Competitive conflicts
- Ethical or environmental conflicts
For key shipper clients, this is supplemented with human review, providing an additional layer of protection for sensitive categories and relationships.
This allows HubEurope to generate revenue from their tracking traffic while preserving trust with both merchants and end users.
Tracking Pages Are About Relationships, Not Slots
Tracking pages sit inside a three-way relationship:
- The courier
- The merchant
- The consumer
Anything shown there reflects on all three.
This is why Extreme Caution Filtering is not a “nice-to-have” feature.
It is the mechanism that allows monetisation to exist without breaking that relationship.
Without Extreme Caution Filtering:
- You maximise short-term yield
- You increase long-term commercial risk (eg. Shipper churn)
With Extreme Caution Filtering:
- You protect merchant relationships
- You protect brand trust
- You unlock sustainable revenue
The Real Lesson from HubEurope
HubEurope didn’t reject monetisation because:
- The traffic was low
- Users weren’t valuable
- Advertisers weren’t interested
They rejected it because: they couldn’t control what would be shown.
That is the core lesson.
Tracking pages can generate revenue — but only if carriers retain control over:
- Which brands appear
- Which categories are allowed
- Which offers are excluded
- How the surface feels to merchants and users
Extreme Caution Filtering is what makes that possible.
