How To Leverage Rakuten Advertising’s Financial Dashboard to Manage and Grow Your Affiliate Program

Financial issuers must stay on top of performance trends so they can optimize their affiliate campaigns and expand their business. Having the right tools to view which partners are growing, where conversion is strongest, and what trends are emerging over time ensures that every dollar in the affiliate channel is maximized.

Rakuten Advertising’s Financial Dashboard makes it easy to see performance and trends by providing interactive visualizations of affiliate campaigns so brands can take the next right action as quickly as possible.

What Can the Financial Dashboard Do?

At its core, the Financial Dashboard is designed to be a problem-solving tool for financial advertisers that quickly tells them whether their campaigns are delivering on program KPIs and where improvements can be made.

By leveraging the Financial Dashboard, financial advertisers can:

• Evaluate affiliate program performance in real time.
• View full-funnel product-level data to understand which publishers are driving interest and conversions against specific products.
• Uncover trends over time across key KPIs including clicks, applications, accounts and approvals.

Understanding Overall Performance Trends

Financial advertisers who have been enabled for our vertical-specific homepage can see several visualizations geared towards understanding trends over time, partner growth trends, and top partner performance. The Performance Overview makes it easier for financial marketers to see how their programs are doing in real time and helps them understand if they need to make immediate changes. Advertisers can choose from pre-set date ranges to view trends and compare performance year-over-year or month-over-month to understand shifts, empowering marketers to make smarter decisions even quicker when it comes to their programs.

In addition to viewing KPI trends such as accounts, applications, or approval rates by a chosen date range, users are also easily able to identify when New Offers went live and when New Publishers were recruited into the program. This allows a financial advertiser to quickly identify the ‘why’ underneath the ‘what’ of the trends.

Users can also look at Top Increasing and Decreasing Publishers. Advertisers can view these trends by Accounts, Applications, or Approval Rate to get a more granular look at how their programs are evolving. These visualizations show changes across all metrics, and based on the data provided, brands can connect with a publisher to start a conversation about the shifts.

For instance, brands can track if a publisher’s daily account volumes increased by a certain percentage in one week compared to the previous month’s average. This could indicate that a new offer recently promoted by the partner was performing well. Similarly, the reporting tools can identify if the quality of applications has gone up or down on a specific date, which could indicate the success of a new offer, or a new campaign, resulting in performance shifts.

Finally, users can look at Top Publishers, which shows all key KPIs. Users can sort by each metric to understand which partners are performing best on each KPI. Users can quickly be taken to the Publisher Profile page to find out more information about the partner, so they can tailor offers and messaging to resonate better with their audiences and extend a new offer quickly and easily within the dashboard directly to the publisher.

Understanding Product-Specific Performance Trends

The Financial Dashboard also has filtering capabilities to allow users to select performance for specific financial products. The Dashboard has been designed to enable you to filter data at the product level across the full conversion funnel, from clickthrough to approval. This unlocks insights on which publishers in your program are driving the best conversion rates for individual products.

This granular level of insight means you can take a data-driven approach to your publisher and product strategy, ensuring that you’re achieving the best yield for your investment. By leveraging the Financial Dashboard, financial services advertisers will gain greater insights on how strategies are driving performance, which publishers are a better fit for specific products, and ultimately make more data-driven decisions around which affiliates perform best against their KPIs.

Alex Comiskey is a Product Manager at Rakuten Advertising. He focuses on Affiliate Reporting, Visualizations, Data Science, and Insights, ensuring that Rakuten Advertising’s partners have the access and knowledge to understand and interpret their performance. He has been with Rakuten Advertising since 2012 and is based in Brooklyn, New York.

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