The reports guide: which affiliate report answers which question

An affiliate platform generates a lot of numbers, and the most common question is not "what does this metric mean?" but "which report do I open to answer this?" This guide is a map. It walks through the analytics command center, the row-level reports for raw activity, and the rollups that rank your offers, affiliates, and advertisers — and it explains the two things that trip people up most: why your dashboard totals are sometimes smaller than your raw click count, and which timezone every date is read in. Once you know which report answers which question, the whole platform gets faster to use.

First, the timezone question

Before any number means anything, you need to know what "today" means. Every report reads in your account's default timezone — a single setting that drives all of it. When you pick a date range, "from" and "to" mean midnight to midnight in your timezone, so a business day starts and ends where yours does. The presets — today, yesterday, last 7, 30, and 90 days, this month, last month — are all worked out on your timezone's calendar. The day, week, and hour buckets in the charts and heatmaps group activity in your timezone. And the timestamp on each row of the clicks and conversions reports is shown in your timezone, with a small label on the toolbar naming the zone so it is never ambiguous.

Under the hood every timestamp is stored in universal time, but you never see raw UTC unless your default timezone is itself set to UTC. Change the setting and every report — dates, presets, buckets, and row times — moves with it consistently. The one deliberate exception worth knowing: cap reset windows reset on UTC boundaries regardless of your timezone, which is covered in the caps and budgets guide. Everything else follows your setting.

"How is the program doing overall?" — the analytics dashboard

The analytics page is the command center, and it is where you start most days. At the top sits a band of headline tiles — clicks, conversions, events, revenue, payout, and profit over your chosen range — each with a delta chip comparing against the previous period of the same length, so you see not just the number but which way it is moving. A secondary strip adds the rate-style metrics: conversion rate, EPC, margin, average sale, and unique visitors. The metrics glossary defines each of these precisely, which is worth having open the first few times.

Below the band, an over-time chart plots one or more metrics together at day, week, or month granularity, with an optional overlay of the previous period as dashed lines so trends are visible at a glance.

The dashboard's real power is its breakdown explorer and cross-filtering. The breakdown is one table you can point at any dimension — affiliate, offer, campaign, channel, creative, sub-ID, country, device, landing page, or source — and on most of those dimensions, clicking a row cross-filters the entire page to that value. Click an affiliate and the whole dashboard narrows to that partner: their band, their funnel, their heatmap, everything, until you remove the filter chip. This is the fastest way to answer "how is this affiliate doing" without leaving the page. There is one honest caveat: some properties (country, device, landing page, source) belong to the click rather than the conversion, so while one of those chips is active, conversion numbers count only conversions linked to a matching click — a subtlety that matters when you are slicing by a click-side property.

Two more panels earn their place. The journey funnel lays your advertisers' catalog events out as proportional stages, each labeled with its percentage of clicks, so you can see how far visitors get and — via lag chips — how long each stage takes. The time heatmap is a weekday-by-hour grid of clicks with conversion markers, which makes dead hours and peak windows obvious at a glance. Both respect your timezone setting.

"Show me every click / every conversion" — the row-level reports

When you need raw activity rather than aggregates, the two row-level reports are where you go.

The clicks report gives you one row per click — time, affiliate, offer, campaign, sub-IDs, and the URL details that tell the full story of where a visitor was sent. The affiliate, campaign, offer, and landing-page values are clickable, opening the underlying record. This is the report you open to verify a specific click happened, or to investigate why a particular placement is or is not tracking. By default it excludes bot-flagged and duplicate-flagged clicks so your view is clean, with toggles to re-include them when you are specifically hunting for excluded traffic.

The conversions report gives you one row per conversion — transaction ID, event type, affiliate, revenue, payout, and a disposition column that surfaces duplicates and unattributed conversions (shown at zero and excluded from counts elsewhere). This is where you verify a specific sale, check a pixel is recording what you expect, and — when conversion review is on — work your pending queue with inline approve and reject buttons. The conversion review guide covers that workflow, and the conversion card's journey view is especially useful: it shows every related click on the offer for that visitor, with the winning click badged as credited, which makes attribution disputes easy to resolve by inspection.

Use the row-level reports when you need to verify a specific event or drill into raw activity; use the dashboard when you need the shape of the whole program.

Conversions versus events: what counts where

Not every tracked action has to count as a conversion, and understanding this distinction prevents a lot of confusion about why your conversion count looks the way it does. Each event in an advertiser's catalog has an "is conversion" toggle. When it is on, rows count as conversions and drive your conversion counts, rate, and totals. When it is off, rows count under a separate events metric instead — still recorded, still attributed, still paid per their economics, but they do not inflate your conversion counts or conversion rate.

This lets you track meaningful mid-funnel actions — a signup, an add-to-cart, a page view — without them muddying the headline conversion number, which you probably want reserved for actual sales. Reports badge each row as a conversion or an event and let you filter to one or the other, so you can look at the full funnel or just the money moments.

"Which offer / affiliate / advertiser is winning?" — the rollups

Three rollup reports rank your program along its main axes. The offer report gives one row per offer with clicks, conversions, revenue, payout, margin, EPC, and average sale — where to look to see which products carry the program. The affiliate report gives the same metrics per affiliate: your partner league table, the fastest way to see who is actually producing. The advertiser report gives the same per advertiser: who is making you money. Each rollup also flags conversions that arrived without a revenue value, which matters for revenue-share billing — a topic the attribution guide and the conversion pixel documentation both touch on.

Why your totals exclude some traffic

Here is the thing that surprises people: the dashboard's headline counts include attributed clicks only, and a click counts as attributed only when it has both a real affiliate and a campaign. Without a campaign the platform does not know the payout or terms, so the affiliate cannot be paid, and the click is treated as unattributed. So a click with no affiliate — direct traffic, or an ID that matched no real affiliate — or no campaign is left out of the dashboard KPIs and breakdowns. This is deliberate: unattributed traffic never inflates your totals, so the numbers you report are the numbers you can actually pay against.

You never lose that traffic, though. Every click, attributed or not, is still in the clicks report, where a flags column explains exactly why an unattributed click did not count — no affiliate, an invalid affiliate ID, no campaign. When your dashboard total looks smaller than you expected, the clicks report is where you find the missing traffic and the reason. Sub-ID-level analysis, for seeing which traffic source within an affiliate is producing, lives in the sub-IDs guide.

Working with any report

All the report tables share a common toolbar worth learning once: date presets figured on your timezone's calendar, filters by affiliate and offer and other dimensions, a column picker to show and hide fields, saved views that capture a whole filter-and-column setup under a name, and a CSV export that downloads the full filtered result set — not just the visible page — with exactly the columns you have shown. Column headers sort server-side, so you can rank by any metric with a click.

The one-line map

The dashboard tells you the shape of the program and lets you cross-filter into any slice of it; the row-level reports show you individual clicks and conversions when you need to verify or investigate; the rollups rank your offers, affiliates, and advertisers; and the clicks report's flags explain any traffic missing from your totals. Keep the metrics glossary beside you for the definitions, and the reporting stops being a pile of numbers and becomes a set of questions with known answers.

If you want to see this reporting run on live traffic — cross-filtering a real affiliate's funnel, exporting a slice, tracing a conversion back to its click — the reporting feature overview shows it in motion, and a demo will drive it on your own data with you.