September 3, 2008
Affiliate Marketing Annoyances: CJ’s Reports
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You ever read any of those “Annoyances” books from O’Reilly Press? Titles like “Windows Vista Annoyances”, “Microsoft Office Annoyances”, actually they’re mostly about Microsoft. Who’da guessed it?
The ideas of these books aren’t so much to bash Microsoft (maybe a little), but to help users work around the annoying things in the operating system and applications with useful tips.
Now I’m sure that Microsoft developers read those books as well and learn from them. At least I hope they do.
Likewise, as a website publisher and affiliate, and former product manager, I’m frequently in the position to have my own ideas not only about how an affiliate network interface should work, but also some tricks to get around the problems and/or be more productive within the environment that we’re given to work in.
I don’t like to complain for complaining’s sake. And Lord knows, I’ve done a lot of complaining here on this blog. While sometimes I get ornery, I like to think that I’m providing constructive feedback and criticism for the networks and merchants who run programs in them. Actually, I frequently hold back, just so I don’t come off as a whiner. But it bothers me that if I don’t provide this feedback when it is on my mind, I’ll probably never bring it up again.
I also find that the more you can become comfortable with the nuances of a network interface, the more likely you are to do business there. So I figure if someone can show you around, it’ll give you a little more confidence to dig in. By bringing up these subjects, I hope to be shown around as much as I’m showing.
So in that spirit, I’m thinking about taking this on as sort of a regular topic here on jangro.com: Affiliate Marketing Annoyances. Hopefully in shining the light on some of the things that can be good and bad about the interfaces we work with, we can all become more productive.
Today’s Subject: CJ’s Reporting
Generally speaking, I really like Commission Junction’s reports. There aren’t many of them (which can be a good thing), but they’re the ones that matter.
Event Date vs. Post Date vs. Click Date
CJ is one of the only networks to show the distinction between the date that an action (sale or lead) happened and when they posted it. This is really nice for being able to see how timely their reporting data is and if there is a delay. More on that below.
But did you know you can also get the click date on transactions in CJ? It isn’t in the transaction report in the interface, but if you download the report data, you get some fields that you won’t see in the screen. Most notably, click date! It is nice to be able to run an analysis to see what the numbers are for click vs. buying for different merchants. With a little excel magic, you can see some interesting data about buyer behavior.
Note the two highlighted rows were clicked weeks before the purchase was actually made. Return/Cookie days DO matter!
Timing of Reporting Data
For merchants who do real-time reporting (pixel tracking on conversion page), CJ is very predictable with their reporting data. They update transaction data hourly, so if you take a look at today’s transactions at the top of the hour (or a few minutes after), you’ll see any new transactions.
You can also see in this report if there are any delays in reporting. At the top of every hour, typically, transactions load at the top of the hour for second hour prior. So at Midnight, PST, the data from 10PM hour is loaded. If you see a bigger gap than that, you know that there is a delay. Of course it helps to have frequent transactions to be able to see these trends, a luxury that we all don’t have.
I love that CJ is so predictable with their transaction data. I know not to look more than once an hour, which in and of itself can keep me doing more work and less stat watching.
Their performance data and balance information are on a longer delay, a few more hours. Anyone know the exact schedule there?
Charts
I’m not a big chart guy when it comes to affiliate data. The one thing that I do like to watch is charts of daily overall revenue (commissions) so I can compare week-over-week performance. For example, I like to look at this monday vs. last monday.
(That spike at the end is Labor Day. Did anyone else see that as a major shopping day? Wow!)
But who makes a chart with days with gridlines every 5 days? C’mon CJ. Make them 7 days. I actually have to count kinks in the line chart to compare same day of week points on the chart.
Saving Reports
I also find that CJ’s reporting involves a lot of clicks to get to the reports that I like to look at. Fortunately, CJ has a feature to save reports. I like to look at today’s transations, yesterday’s transactions, and yesterday’s merchant performance. So that’s what I have in my saved reports. Saves me a bunch of clicks.
What are your tips, tricks, complaints about CJ’s reporting?
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