Analyze Reports
Welcome to the reports section of the documentation. In here you will learn how to create informative and clear reports and what the common reports types are. Go through the list of topics below to select the best match for you.
Why Reports?
A report is any set of meaningful data that you define. They may be very general. For example, a list of all your active campaigns with date range set to today is a report. Another example would be the list of offers from the last week, sorted from the most to least profitable ones. They both provide important information about the current situation.
But reports can show so much more. After all, they are the whole reason for recording data that flows to Voluum. Reports can be more detailed and specific. Creating a report is like conducting an investigation: To answer your question (for example, "What device type was the most profitable yesterday in India in my Sample Campaign?") you need to define the actors (Sample Campaign, countries, devices) and then look for an answer with various tools and options (groupings, drill-downs). Your final report will be:
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In the example above, the answer to our question about the device type is 'Desktop'. That's the outcome of our investigation.
What You May Learn From Reports
At least half of your work as an affiliate will be analyzing reports. They are essential to any optimization efforts. Below, there are some sample answers you may learn from analyzing reports. Click on one to learn how to create a report and find the answer:
Before you dive into Voluum's vast reporting option, go to your traffic source platform for a second and check, what traffic targeting options you have. There is no point in checking how various mobile carriers perform if you cannot target the best performing carriers later on.
Open a specific report for a given campaign.
Select a report category that is compliant with the traffic targeting options in your traffic source. In our example, we target by OS type.
Once you have your report, check which operating systems look promising in terms of pure profit or CR. Then stop targeting the unpromising ones in your traffic source platform.
Voluum offers you the option to compare the same, subsequent time ranges on a chart and in columns. So you can compare last week's data with data from the current one with a simple click. This allows you to observe trends and gives you a wider perspective.
Go to any report, for example, a global campaign report.
Click the time range selector and set the desired time range.
Turn on the Compare toggle.
Click the Apply button.
Observe changes in new Visit change and Conversion change columns.
Performing lander A/B testing is a standard affiliate procedure. You link to one offer from two landers in order to see, which one resonates best with your audience. To see how they perform after a while, follow these steps:
Create a specific report for a given campaign.
Drill down into the offer that you want to check.
Go to the Landers category.
Sometimes certain offers work better for weekends or workdays. Many traffic sources support the day parting feature, which allows you to target only specific days or hours of the day, and Voluum provides this kind of information.
Create a specific report for a given campaign.
Select a time range that is at least a week long
Click the Day-parting option and select the Day of the week option from the drop-down menu.
Sort data by conversion.
There is a difference between a visit and a unique visit. When a visitor goes through a campaign URL within 24 hours (the lifetime of a cookie), Voluum counts that as a visit, but not as a unique visit. You may notice that you have a lot of repeat visitors who have a lower conversion rate. In that situation you may want to create a rule-base path to direct these repeat visitors to different offers."
Go to the global report for offers.
Make sure that you have the Unique visits column visible.
Compare data in Visits and Unique visits columns.
Once you create a report, there is still so much to do to make your work easier. You can:
Export data to CSV | |||
Create a custom notification that is based on your report with just a few clicks. | Click the star icon on the specific report tab to save your report and have it at hand each time you sign in to Voluum | Share your automatically updating report with outside parties by sending a special link. | Export data that you have outlined in your report to a CSV file. |
I. Get Started With Reports
Interested in mastering reports? The set of documents below describes options used in the examples above in more detail.
III. Optimization: Best Practices
The following set of articles gives you hints, tips, and tricks about setting up and maintaining a profitable campaign. Treat them as general suggestions, not as a strict rule book that you need to follow by the letter. The things that distinguish a great affiliate marketer from simply good ones is not the knowledge of different features and options, but understanding WHY and HOW campaigns work and WHAT does this person's audience respond to.