How to Use Reports

Use Refersion and Looker reports to track your most meaningful metrics, and optimize your program.

Andre Tan avatar
Written by Andre Tan
Updated over a week ago

Let’s zoom out for a sec. Just like the overall marketing of your brand, your affiliate marketing strategy will have a funnel of sorts. From the top of the funnel:

Acquire Affiliates

  • Create a starting offer

  • Establish a communication channel

  • Customize and publish your affiliate registration page

  • Receive and review applications

Activate & Engage Affiliates

  • Welcome approved affiliates to the program

  • Provide them with the tracking — links or conversion triggers — they need.

  • Sit back and see what they do

  • Check in as needed

Incentivize Affiliates

  • Reward top performers

  • Create more advanced offer structures for those who need incentives

Periodically, you may also want to clean house.

At each stage, you’ll have questions about how you’re doing:

  • Am I getting the right quantity and quality of affiliates from existing channels?

  • How engaged is my network?

  • Which offers are the most effective?

  • Who are my top performing affiliates and influencers?

  • Who needs some incentivizing?

  • Does any of this activity look fraudulent?

Our reports will help you find the answers to these questions and more.

📍 Where we are in app: Reporting > New Report

Available Platform Reports

We have 4 available reports that you can get ad hoc or set to receive automatically (recurring):

  • Performance by Affiliate

  • Performance by Offer

  • Performance by Creative

  • Performance by SKU

Our top reporting recommendation

We recommend automating the Performance by Affiliate report to always stay in touch with what’s happening in your network.

Advanced Reporting

Our performance reports can help you isolate some program KPIs, but if you’re interested in going deeper, then we’ll work directly with you to create a report based on all available account data points and your current plan allowances.

Examples of some advanced reporting options include:

  • Daily sales reports without time limitations

  • Affiliates who joined in a particular month and had the greatest number of conversions.

  • Affiliates who had greater than one sale during a specific time period.

  • Attribution method that generated the most revenue.

Contact a member of our Customer Success team to discuss your advanced reporting options via in-app chat or email: [email protected].

Feeding Better Data into your Reports

After — and only after — you’ve had some time to see affiliates join, log in, drive sales and get paid, you will have enough data to know how to segment them.

📍 Where we are in app: Manage > Offers

You do this by creating offers with distinct and recognizable titles like: “Twitch Offer,” “Instagram Offer,” “YouTube Offer,” and inviting the corresponding cohort of affiliates to each offer. Now, when you glance at your Dashboard or run a report, your KPIs will have clear top-level recognition.

Some Ideas on Using Your Data to Drive Improvements

  • If you notice lots of clicks (from a third-party tracking tool or your own website data), but not enough sign-ups, you may want to take another look at your registration page content. Is it too prohibitive? Are you targeting the right audience?

  • If you’ve pulled a Performance by Affiliate report, and no one is driving any significant sales, your next step is to open up a channel to ensure continuous engagement. A drip campaign via Klaviyo or another integration partner can help tremendously with this.

  • You might also test an incentive, like a tiered offer structure, to re-engage and boost sales.

  • If you had good engagement with your network, and then you see a dip, try to re-engage with an announcement, direct message, or even send out a survey to find out what their challenges and current motivations are.

  • If you identify a top performing influencer, you may want to give them a temporary bonus in the form of a commission boost (or some other form of reward).

  • If you pull a Performance by SKU report, and identify a product that is lagging in sales, you could try running a sale with a limited-time commission attached.

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