In the reporting section of your Commission Factory account, there are various data sets you can analyze. This varies based on what information you are passing through via the commission factory pixel.
Dummy sales report graph
Firstly, in the Sales report; this gives a top-line overview of the key metrics by date. This can be a total amount of daily, weekly, or monthly conversions. This can be selected on the top right-hand side. Here, you can also select what metric you wish to see on the graph:
- Clicks
- Impressions
- Sales (Revenue)
- Transactions
- Commission
If you click on ‘Annotations’, you can see what promotions/ key events or coupons you have ran during that period if uploaded into the creative section and ticked ‘show in annotations’. This is a useful tool to visualize whether there was a spike during a key promotional period.
You can select the date range by either ‘this month’, ‘this week’ or customize it to the specific dates you wish to see. You can compare the time period to:
- The previous period, for example, if the date range is ‘week’ it will compare the previous week
- The previous year which will compare the same dates the year before.
The next report is the Affiliates where you can review performance by publisher. The bar graph demonstrates what publisher type is driving performance, you can toggle the different KPIs on the top left. The affiliates are displayed in alphabetical order. To see who your top-performing affiliates are; you need to click twice on any of the metrics (clicks, conversions, sale value etc) and this will sort the affiliates high to low.
If you are unsure of the affiliate name you can select the downward arrow right at the end of the row and press ‘View Affiliate’. Here it will bring up all the information of the affiliate in the about section and. In addition, they often upload a media deck which you can download. You can also find their website/s under traffic sources and select the right-handed arrow at the end and you can click on the traffic source. From the downward drop-down icon you can also see a report by date on one affiliate level at a time.
The Creatives report will show performance based on the advertiser’s creatives. If an affiliate is using a text link this will fall under ‘unnamed creative’. Loyalty and coupon sites are a publisher type example that would only use their tracking link therefore fall under unnamed creative. It is expected for the majority of sales to be tracked as ‘unnamed creative’. Banners, coupons and promotions are all creative types. If the affiliate has pulled any of these from the dashboard it will be tracked under the name of the banner/ promotion or coupon.
The graph at the top shows the proportion of conversions coming through the various creative types:
- Banner
- Coupon
- Data feed
- Promotion
- Text link
- Video
- Widget
The creative report is also good to see what banners affiliates are utilising. The best way to identify this is sort thing impressions highest to lowest (double-clicking on impressions) and you can see which banners have the most impressions.
Cart Data reporting is really useful to see what products are converting via the affiliate channel. To caveat, not all shopping carts are able to pass through this information through the pixel, however, if you can, it is strongly advised to do so. To successfully track cart data, you need to pass through:
- SKU
- Name
- Quantity
- Sale amount
To see the highest selling products based, firstly you select the time period you wish to analyse. You then sort by “Quantity”
The graphs display daily, weekly or monthly basis of how many items were sold based on the dates selected. You can also see on this graph AVG. basket quantity, revenue, commission and AOV by using the drop-down and clicking on the desired metric you wish to see on the graph.
The Visitors report will show you what destination your visitors are converting from. If you are an AU/ NZ brand, you would expect the majority of your conversions coming from ‘Oceania’. The countries are arranged in alphabetical order, however, if you wish to see the top converting countries at the top you double click either the conversions or sale value to order it.
The Insights report will display new vs returning customer data. This is displayed on an affiliate level so you can identify what publishers are driving new vs returning customers.
The graph shows over the chosen time period, what publisher types are driving:
- New Customer Conversions
- Return Customer Conversions
- New Customer CPA
- Return Customer CPA
- New Customer ROAS
- Return Customer ROAS
- Overall ROAS
You can select one of the above by using the drop-down menu and clicking on your desired data set.
The table goes into detail on an affiliate level on what % each affiliate is driving new customers vs returning customer
For this report to be utilised the advertiser must be passing back new vs returning customer data via the conversion tracking pixel.
The Attribution Report contains a breakdown of your affiliates, and where they sit in the conversion funnel with your customers. Some affiliates may be more of an introducer, whereas some affiliates may be more of a closer at the bottom of the funnel.
Introducer - The original introducer in the conversion path.
Influencer - This affiliate assisted mid-way through the conversion path.
Closer - This affiliate is the last affiliate in the conversion path, and the last referrer before the sale is made.
The commission will be credited to the closer as that is where the final cookie is dropped as we track on a last-click model.
Date Ranges
To adjust the date range for the reports, clicking into the field will give you common options such as Last Week or Last Month, or Custom where you can specify the date ranges you would like to search.