The Ultimate Black Friday + Cyber Monday Guide for Merchants – Part III

Undoubtedly, you’ve spent hours planning and setting up for the Q4 craze.  Don’t just set it up and then  leave it.  Make sure to evaluate and look at some reporting so that you know what to do next year!  What worked and what didn’t work?  Figure it out!

While each Merchant program is different and may require additional reporting, these are the weekly & monthly we recommend every Merchant starts with, but can be run as often as daily!

Weekly Reports

• Transaction Detail Report – View all the transaction data in real time, and provide the option to void or edit sales and set flags on specific sales.

• Affiliate Timespan Report – Use this report every day because it is highly valuable.  It gives a quick snapshot of all of the activity on the account, including clicks, sales, bonuses, and voids.

• Banner Performance – This report is an excellent tool to drill down to not only what banners are being used, but it also as a means to see which pages the links and banners are on.

Monthly Reports

• Monthly Payment Review – Summarize all transactions that will be paid to affiliates on the upcoming 20th of the month.

• Weekly Progress Report – See a snapshot of your program’s performance by the day, by the week or by the month.

• Notable Affiliates – Get a list of your top performing affiliates, as well as your top affiliate gainers and losers.

Don’t forget, additional reporting will depend on your individual program and trends – for example, the Affiliate Comparison Report can be used to identify significant increases or decreases in activity from certain affiliates; US State Revenue Report should be reviewed if they have Nexus restrictions and generated a large number of sales; the Product Breakout Report could be used to see the top performing products from affiliates (only if have product level data in tracking code).

Determine Promotional Performance

If you ran any special promotions for Black Friday or Cyber Monday, run some reports to see how successful they were! That way you can determine how much impact the campaign had and know whether you should run it again next year – the planning never stops!

Banner Performance – view the activity on all creative tools for a specific period of time. In a previous post, we identify some examples on how you can use this report to measure campaign impact.

Determine Affiliate Performance

Affiliate Comparison – see side by side comparison of how your affiliate’s are performing

Affiliate First Transaction – a great report to show you which affiliates generated their first transaction for your program. The perfect reason to drop a little thank you note.

Notable Affiliates – Get a list of your top performing affiliates, as well as your top affiliate gainers and losers. Keep up with this report to determine which affiliates need a little attention or who might deserve a bonus for all their hard work.

Determine Overall Performance

Year in review – get a monthly summary of your program by month to easily see a snapshot of month/month or year/year comparisons and quickly identify peaks and valleys.

As the craze and busyness of the holiday season wraps up, compare your performance to the previous year and make notes to yourself.  Don’t forget to make notes about other content sites and blogs that you found the most compelling. What did they do this shopping season to stand out? Keeping a competitive eye open at all times will help you evolve and provide a jumping off point for new ideas and inspiration.

SWOT analyses can be a fantastic tool that you can use to inspect your past efforts. You can not only use it for your blog overall, but you can it to individually analyze your blog posts, each social media platform, email campaigns, past strategies and more!

And just when you think you’re done…

With the start of the new year, let’s keep the high energy and excitement going!

Helpful Resources:

Engaging Affiliates after Q4 Part 1
Engaging Affiliate After Q4 Part 2