As soon as you start testing, numbers appear on the Dashboard and in reports. Four columns carry everything else.
- Clicks: traffic through affiliate links.
- Leads: forms submitted through an iframe or the API.
- Transactions: what a commission created from a conversion.
- Costs and Revenues: what you pay and what you are paid, with Profit as the difference.
Every other metric in PalDock is derived from these. EPL, CPC, ROI, and the rest are all ratios of the same four numbers. See Columns explained.
Clicks and leads count what was accepted
The click and lead columns hold what PalDock processed. Anything refused on arrival, whether it failed validation, was filtered out, or was a duplicate, is not in them. It is not lost either, it is in the logs with the reason.
That is why three different lead numbers exist:
- Gross leads: everything that arrived.
- Leads: what was accepted and counted.
- Unique leads: how many were the first from that person in the product.
Your own numbers will usually be higher than the ones here, because two events on your side can resolve to one lead. See Origin Deduplication.
Why the numbers may look wrong at first
Three settings change what a report says, and all three have defaults that surprise people on day one.
- The result type filter starts on approved only. Transactions your advertiser has not decided yet are not counted, so fresh traffic can show leads and no revenue.
- The reporting time basis starts on origin time. A sale confirmed today is reported back on the day its lead arrived, so yesterday keeps changing.
- The date range is whatever the picker says. Test conversions arriving late land outside a narrow range.
A report that looks empty is far more often one of these than a broken setup. If you want to see everything, set the result filter to all three and widen the range.
Where to go next
- A number looks wrong: check the three settings above, then Columns explained.
- Something is missing entirely: the logs.
- A conversion exists but no payout came out of it: the conversion log, then How PalDock picks a commission.
