Step 3: Analyse Data

Different campaign setups require different ways of looking at their performance. Think how campaign events flow and select the most reliable and informative performance indicators for you. What would it be? Impression click-through rate (iCTR)? Conversion rate for clicks or visits (CR or CV)? Any other? Which should be the first one to tell you that your campaign is starting to run well?

Whatever you select, always check your overall ROI; after all, it is the most important metric for you. Check the performance of specific elements and compare them with each other. Maybe your landing page does not perform well, and the ratio of visits and clicks is very low? Does it mean that your landing page requires improvements?

Take a look at the following points to to gain some insights how to analyze campaign funnels:

• If you track impressions, use the iCTR indicator, in other cases the CTR is a good measure of attractiveness of your ad. Look at CR or CV indicators - this is the basic metric of profitability of your campaigns. They will tell you how many visitors took your offer, but if you want to know how much money you get for a single conversion, use the AP metric, if your payout value is set to automatic in the offer's setup.
• Your traffic is your source of income. The better quality the traffic is, the more conversions it will generate. Learn how to assess if traffic you receive is worth the money you pay. If you get lot of visits, but no conversions, it might be due to the poor quality of your traffic.
• Check Error log tab to see, if there are any errors in your setup. If you get the Postback request invalid message, fix your setup; otherwise no information about a conversion would be recorded.

• Look at the performance of different campaign elements and categories in global reports. Check how they perform against each other, identify the top and worst performing elements.

• Don't make random guesses, try to make educated guesses. Use the Optimization Calculator feature to calculate the likelihood of conversion for a given element.

  • Optimization Calculator

Voluum offers you an option to analyze data on different level of details. You can go as granular as looking at traffic info on the level of individual cities. But don't waste time going too granular, you do not need to focus on a very small segment of your audience. If your campaign is targeted to the global or country audience, analyze its performance at a regional level.

• Create a specific report to cross-reference data with each other. Use grouping to see a conjunction of selected groups of data or drill-down into several levels of categories to go into narrowing data funnel. At the same time, don't get distracted by the plethora of information - you will waste time trying to find non-existing or irrelevant dependencies. Looking into how your offers perform on different browsers might be a good idea, but looking on their performance on different browser versions might be too much.
• Keep your reports neat and tidy. Hide information that is not relevant to you. If you don't track clicks, hide the Clicks column from view.