This article will cover:
- What Are Insights?
- Why Were They Built?
- What Dashboards Come Standard With Insights?
- Can I Add My Own Custom Dashboard?
- What New Reporting Concepts Are Available With Insights?
- What New Functionality Is Available With Insights?
- FAQ
What Are Insights?
Insights are advanced and customizable business intelligence (BI) dashboards integrated directly into the platform. These new reports allow our customers to quickly create tailored visualizations and provide the valuable insights required for optimizing, strategic decision-making, and fraud prevention. Overall, these reports enhance our customer's ability to efficiently manage and maximize the effectiveness of their affiliate marketing programs.
Why Were They Built?
Insights were developed to compliment CAKE master reports and simultaneously address certain data limitations users may encounter within our detailed master reports.
In particular, customers expressed a need to more easily understand key performance indicators (KPIs), surface the top performers of their program, and compare critical metrics period over period. Previously, this could only be accomplished by exporting data to Excel sheets or third-party systems such as Tableau, Domo, Power BI, and others. Additionally, clients found themselves employing data experts to traverse our APIs and build custom reports outside of CAKE.
Today, Insights reports eliminate these extra steps by providing robust, customizable reporting capabilities with a simple yet powerful user interface, directly in the platform!
What Dashboards Come Standard With Insights?
Insights comes enabled with three dashboards which provide an essential view into your affiliate marketing performance. These dashboards are:
- KPIs: An all-encompassing snapshot of performance metrics critical to understanding the health of your business and optimizing affiliate marketing efforts.
- Top Performers: Surfaces the best-performing Affiliates and Offers on your program.
- Period Over Period: Quickly recognize trends, track progress, and make informed strategic decisions based on historical performance data.
Can I Add My Own Custom Dashboard?
Yes! Beyond what is immediately available, customers can request custom dashboards be added to their account through CAKE's Professional Services department. Click below to request more information or a quote:
CAKE Professional Services - Request Information
What New Reporting Concepts Are Available With Insights?
Insights introduces several new concepts designed to enhance the user experience. The new concepts include:
- Period: Allows users to select the time intervals over which data is aggregated and presented, making it easier to identify trends, patterns, and changes over time.
- Metric to Draw: Refers to selecting a specific key performance indicator (KPI) or metric to plot on a chart or graph. It represents the core data point that you want to visualize and analyze. Users can choose from a variety of metrics to visualize including: clicks, conversions, revenue, cost, conversion rate, EPC, and more.
- Group By: Allows users to aggregate data based on a primary and/or secondary reporting dimension in order to perform calculations or summary functions on the grouped data.
What New Functionality Is Available With Insights?
Insights also introduces several new features that allow users to slice and dice data to their hearts content. The new functionality includes:
- Customizable Dashboards: Users can create and customize dashboards using the available controls to visualize data according to their unique needs and preferences.
- Advanced Filtering: Multi-select filter values, search-to-select, and the ability to search partial string matches, paired with all the entity filters you know and love, enables users to find data in ways previously not possible.
- Dynamic Updates: Reporting dashboards automatically sync with any changes in your program (ie. mass adjustments and scrubbed conversions), ensuring the data remains up-to-date with the latest information.
FAQ
Can I do day-of-week over day-of-week comparison (ie. this Monday vs last Monday)?
Yes, today you can use the Period over Period dashboard, filter for a Date Range that captures both days you want to analyze, and set your Period control to "Day." This will allow you to see the performance of the current week compared to the previous week aggregated by each day.
Can I see an aggregated report for Campaign + Sub Affiliate?
Yes, Insights gives users the option to Group By Primary and Secondary data columns. Simply select "Campaign" as the primary group by and "Sub ID 1" as the secondary group by option.
Is Insights data real-time?
Currently Insights data is on a 3 hour delay. Because Insights is focused on data aggregation, anything that requires real-time analysis should reference CAKE master reports.