CPA Networks

How You Get Data Varies by Network;
What You Do With It Doesn't.

Quick Links

The Basics

  1. Intro: Why You Should Use CPA Ads
  2. Who the Players Are
  3. Context: Who Needs Whom?
  4. Getting Approved
  5. Finding the Right Advertisers

The Ads

  1. Ad Sizes
  2. Pulling Ads
  3. Inserting Full Page Ads
  4. Creating/Inserting a 2-Page Ad Spread
  5. Inserting Small In-Article Ads

The Relationships

  1. Who's Keen To Build a Relationship?
  2. Negotiating: Perspectives & Leverage
  3. Choosing the Right Ads
  4. Is an Advertiser Worth Working With?
  5. An Example EPC Analysis

The Data

  1. Tracking: Part 1
  2. Tracking: Part 2
  3. Tracking: Part 3
  4. Wrap Up

Ad Performance Tracking - Part 3

An Example Report

Even though there's a wealth of information at your fingertips inside each affiliate platform reports, really there are only two that matter:
  1. Performance/Revenue Reports
  2. Transaction/Link Reports
All you're looking for is:
  1. How much money is this making?
  2. What ads are working/not working?


When you login, you'll see a screen like this:



Since Performance / Revenue reports are pretty cut-and-dried, we'll just focus our attention here on the 'Transaction' report, so head into the 'Reports > Transaction', and you'll see something like this:



By default, there's more data viewable than needed, so you probably want to customize your columns to eliminate the noise and distratction. In CJ, it's the button above the "Advertiser Name" column.

As you can see here, we have more disabled than enabled.



Let's take a quick look at the first two transactions from above from the Transaction Report, TrapCall.com and Hotels.com.

Here you're going to get a glimpse at the ads that are working, the ad network EPCs, and other stuff to keep an eye on like the Link and Relationship Statuses.

In the examples above, the EPC from the TrapCall ad is 0.00; Hotels.com is > $55.00. (Remember, they're clickable, so you should be able to zoom in and read them.)

The TrapCall.com one, even though it's at $0.00, I'm not going to worry about because it's outperforming many other ads and brands for us.

Hotels.com is working for us and also has a nice $55 EPC, so it's going to stay, too.

Now, it's just a question of applying some of the concepts covered earlier and looking at what's working and what isn't to see how you can improve things even more.

« Prior
Tracking: Part 2 		Next »
Wrap-Up