Affiliate reporting explained Commission Junction Reporting

The purpose of this article is to show you how to determine just how much you are spending on each ad group or campaign and how much you are earning back in commission and to calculate whether or not you are turning a profit. You do this simply by adding up your earnings for a particular period of time a day, a week, a month then subtracting the cost of your advertising campaign for the same period of time. The remainder is your profit or loss.

AFFILIATE REPORTING

Within a day or two of starting your first campaigns, you might begin to receive reporting data from affiliate networks although until a campaign has run for the full referral period this data is not yet fully relevant and should not be used to make any major adjustments, unless it is clear that you are spending far more than you are getting back in return. In that case, you should pause the ad group or campaign in question and wait until the end of the referral period to see whether late commissions can make up for the shortfall. The referral period, by the way, is the number of days after the original user’s click for which the affiliate program will still pay commissions on the user’s actions. Until this period is complete, you cannot be 100 percent sure of your actual earnings.

In order to see how much you have earned from an affiliate program in a given period of time, you must run a report on that program from within the affiliate network interface to which the affiliate program belongs. In this example, I use the Commission Junction interface to see how much my Monster.com campaign earned in the month of October 2005.

Commission Junction Reporting

First, you must log on to the CJ Account Manager using the e-mail address and password you used when you set up your account. Next, click on the Run Reports link near the top of the page. (Disclaimer: The dollar amounts shown are examples of a publisher’s account and do not represent all Commission Junction clients.)

On the Transaction Reports page, click on the Report Options link to expand the Transaction Reports page to include customizable report options.

Select Report Type.

On this section of the page, select Commission Detail from the Select Report Type drop-down menu, then select the affiliate program name from the drop-down menu just below it. I have selected Monster.com, as it is a campaign that had been profitable for me for a long time, even though eventually my success with other campaigns meant that maintaining this campaign was no longer worth the effort compared to the larger returns I was garnering with other programs.

Select Time Frame.

Here you will choose Date Range and enter the beginning and end dates of the period you wish to receive your report on. You’ll see that I have selected the month of October 2005. You may leave the next selection on its default choice, Event Date, and click on the Generate Report button.

Report Totals.

For this simple exercise, you may simply note that the total above the column labeled “Commission (USD)” is $842.50. Subtract from this amount the $1.00 total you see displayed above the “Corrected (USD)” column, as this represents the transactions reversed during the reporting period. The final total earned for October 2005 was $841.50.

Believe it or not, this is all we really need from the affiliate side for the simple evaluation of this campaign’s performance. Now, if I’d had multiple ad groups for Monster at the time, I might have needed to sort this report by SID (which is the unique variable we can add to the end of Commission Junction tracking codes to make unique tracking links for each ad group) and manually add up the results for each SID. Let’s move on to Search Reporting, then.