Reporting Overview
Reporting helps you to analyze your advertising data. Reports reflect the performance of your campaigns.
Performance reports illustrate the performance measurement of your campaign and its underlying entities. They provide important data insights that can be used to:
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Monitor traffic
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Analyze patterns
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Compile information
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Forecast budget capacity
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Formulate strategic decision-making
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Identify growth opportunities
Reporting API
The reporting API helps you retrieve the analytics of your campaign for the requested time period.
It provides reporting endpoints that aggregate the performance of entity specific results which helps in comprehensive data analysis.
The reporting endpoints help you improve your campaign’s advertising performance by analyzing and refining your keywords, ads, and bids. Additionally, you can also view the performance data related to your impressions, clicks, conversion rates, sales, spends, and other factors for the requested period of time.
The Reporting API offers you performance reports and bulk performance reports
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Performance results
Data freshness
The freshness of data in advertising metrics indicates the duration required for data collection, processing, and delivery to reports. It represents the quality of the data set by assessing its up-to-dateness. Data freshness plays a crucial role in establishing reliability on data and facilitates informed decision-making by considering the timeliness of information.
In order to prevent advertisers from incurring unnecessary charges, bol executes the following actions on every advertising metric (impressions, clicks and conversions):
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Processing - The API provides access to the latest performance data for all entities with updates made available with a 1-hour delay ensuring timely and accurate insights for your campaigns.
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Validation - Performance metrics are refreshed and validated at daily, weekly, and monthly intervals, and is subject to change for up to 60 days back from the current date in rare cases. We recommend re-retrieving reports monthly to ensure your performance metrics are up to date.
To ensure the utmost data accuracy, we commit to nightly updates for the previous period’s data. This process is carefully managed to ensure that all data will be refreshed and fully updated by 6 AM each day, Amsterdam time (CET/CEST). This approach allows us to maintain high standards of data integrity and reliability.
Sales and conversions
Several reporting endpoints include sales and conversion fields when providing you the performance results of your campaign and its underlying objects. These fields come in variants that differ by two dimensions: the attribution model (post-click or post-view) and the lookback window (14 or 30 days). It is imperative to understand the relation between these fields to avoid ambiguity related to the calculation of total sales and conversions for your products.
Attribution model
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Post-click: the sale or conversion is attributed when a visitor clicks on an advertisement. Post click fields are available with 14 and 30 day lookback windows.
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Post-view: the sale or conversion is attributed when a visitor views (is served an impression of) an advertisement, even if they did not click on it. Post-view fields are only available with the 30-day lookback window.
Attribution Order
The following attribution order is used across propositions: directClick → indirectClick → directView → indirectView. If multiple attributions could be applicable to an order the order will be attributed to the strongest attribution category it is applicable for.
Lookback window
The lookback window is the period after the click or view during which a purchase is still attributed to the advertisement. It acknowledges the time a visitor needs to make a purchasing decision after being influenced by the ad. Depending on the proposition different lookback windows are available, below is a table that show which fields are available per proposition:
| Field | Lookback window | Attribution | Sponsored products |
|---|---|---|---|
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14-day |
Post-click |
✓ |
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14-day |
Post-click |
✓ |
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14-day |
Post-click |
✓ |
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14-day |
Post-click |
✓ |
|
14-day |
Post-click |
✓ |
|
14-day |
Post-click |
✓ |
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30-day |
Post-click |
✓ |
|
30-day |
Post-click |
✓ |
|
30-day |
Post-click |
✓ |
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30-day |
Post-click |
✓ |
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30-day |
Post-click |
✓ |
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30-day |
Post-view |
✓ |
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30-day |
Post-view |
✓ |
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30-day |
Post-view |
✓ |
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30-day |
Post-view |
✓ |
For the full definition of each field, see the Glossary.
Direct and indirect
Within every attribution model and lookback window, conversions and sales are further split into direct and indirect:
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Sponsored products
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Direct: the exact advertised product or a product within the same product family was purchased (
Product 'A' clicked/viewed → Product 'A' family purchased). -
Indirect: a different product was purchased. For Suppliers, this is a purchase within the same brand and category (level 1); for Sellers, a purchase within the same category (level 1) from the same retailer (
Product 'A' clicked/viewed → Product B purchased).-
Note: If products have multiple categories, all categories are considered for indirect attribution.
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Branded shelves
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Direct: the exact advertised product or a product within the same product family was purchased (
Product 'A' clicked/viewed → Product 'A' family purchased). -
Indirect: a different product was purchased. For Suppliers, this is a purchase within the same brand and category (level 1); for Sellers, a purchase within the same category (level 1) from the same retailer (
Product 'A' clicked/viewed → Product B purchased).-
Note: If products have multiple categories, all categories are considered for indirect attribution.
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Key aspects
It’s important to highlight two key aspects in this process, which apply to every variant above:
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Attribution based on click or view time: A conversion is attributed to the exact time a visitor clicks on (post-click) or views (post-view) an advertisement. For example, if a visitor clicks on an ad for some item on Monday and purchases it within the applicable lookback window (14 or 30 days), this purchase is attributed as a conversion to that specific click. This model ensures precise tracking of the ad’s effectiveness in prompting a purchasing decision.
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Multiple sale units in a conversion: A single conversion might encompass multiple sale units. For instance, if a visitor, influenced by an ad, purchases three items in a single transaction, this is counted as one conversion. The sales fields report the total cost of all items sold (in this case, three), whereas the conversions fields count this transaction as a single conversion.
Reports vs Insights
The metric averageWinningBid is available for certain entities in the Bulk Performance Reporting and Performance Reporting endpoints, as well as in the Insights endpoints.
The calculation of this metric differs between the Reporting and Insights endpoints:
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In the Reporting endpoints, only days on which your campaign had performance, are considered.
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In the Insights endpoints, the entire landscape over the past 14 days is considered.
As a result, if your campaign had days without performance in the last 14 days, the averageWinningBid metric will differ between reports covering this period and the values provided by the Insights endpoints.
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Metrics exclude basic invalid traffic (GIVT). Advanced fraud (SIVT) is not filtered. |