Reports by the Numbers

Continuing with our theme of #ByTheNumbers, I’m going to go over a few important numbers related to the Reports available to Merchants on the ShareASale Network.

This number is important – 15 – remember that one!   Every month on the 15th, the Monthly Payment Review report is released.

Every Merchant should review this report prior to the 20th (payday for Affiliates.)

You can see a whole summary of exactly what this report entails by viewing our earlier blog post http://blog.shareasale.com/2013/03/18/monthly-payment-review/

The Monthly Payment Review report summarizes all transactions that will be paid to affiliates on the upcoming 20th.

1. The Order Number and Lock Date – The Order Number should coincide with your actual Order Number in your own system – and the Lock Date is the date on which the transaction can no longer be voided, and is paid out to the Affiliate.

2. Transaction Type and Commission Type.   The Transaction Type will indicate a Sale or a Lead.  The Commission Type will tell you how the actual commission was calculated.  This could be the “Default Commission”, or could be something like a “Group Commission”, “Personalized Commission Rule”, “Product SKU Commission”, etc…

3. The Dollars.   This area will show the Sale amount, the amount paid in commission, and the amount paid to ShareASale.

4. The Affiliate – This area will tell you which specific Affiliate referred this transaction.

5.The Referrer – This should always be the checkout page of your own shopping platform. 

6. The IP Address – This will show you the IP of the shopper, this is most handy in the cases of finding orders that may have been placed by your own internal call center or customer service reps.

7. The Page Banner was Clicked From – To the best of our ability (sometimes referrers are hidden in browsers) this will show from which page the customer clicked.  If it is blank, this does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the transaction at all – this is often something that an Affiliate cannot help.   If the pattern is repeated for a specific Affiliate, this is something you may want to follow up with on them to determine how the traffic is being sent.

8. Return Days – This is the amount of time that took place between the click and the sale.

9. The Clickstream – This is important data and shows you not only the Sale Transaction, but the Commissioned Click and also any Previous Clicks.

10.The Date and History – This shows you the date of the transaction – and if you click the icon you can view the entire history of the transaction such as when it was edited, voided, etc…

One of the more useful, and sometimes underutilized tools within the ShareASale interface is the “Saved Report”.

Nearly any report that you run can be saved – and then customized so that you can very quickly get back to numbers that you look at every week, month, etc…

There are 2 places to then access any Saved Report.

In the top left corner of the interface, click the ShareASale “Puck” – and the Menu will appear for access to Saved Reports…

or…

On the Stripe at the bottom of the interface you can add any of your Saved Reports as indicated by the screen shot below.