Every number in a report has to sit on a day. PalDock lets you decide which day that is, because a single journey has three dates on it: the click or lead arrived on one day, the transaction was created on another, and the result was decided on a third.
Three options:
- Origin time: the day the click or lead was created. This is the default.
- Transaction time: the day the transaction was created.
- Approval time: the day the transaction result was decided.
Switch between them with the target icon in the table header.
What the choice changes
- It moves transactional metrics only: transactions, costs, revenues, profit, and everything derived from them.
- Clicks and leads always stay on the day they arrived. They have no transaction behind them, so there is nothing to move.
- Over a long enough period the totals are the same in all three modes. What changes is which day each amount lands on.
- Nothing is ever lost. Whichever basis you look at, the payout sits on the partner balance and is invoiced from there. The report is a view, not the source of the money.
Origin time
Everything is reported back to the day the click or lead was created. A sale confirmed today lands on the day its lead arrived, which may be three weeks ago.
Use it when:
- You are evaluating campaign performance and comparing traffic sources.
- You want to know what a given day of traffic was actually worth.
- You are making optimisation decisions on recent activity.
What to expect:
- Historical days keep changing. Yesterday looks incomplete, because transactions from yesterday’s leads are still arriving and will be added to it later.
- A day is only final once every conversion from it has been decided, which depends on how long your advertisers take.
Transaction time
Everything is reported on the day the transaction was created, which is the day the conversion arrived and a commission produced a payout from it.
Use it when:
- You want to see what came in during a period, regardless of when the traffic behind it happened.
- You are reconciling against an advertiser who reports the same way.
- You are watching conversions arrive day to day.
What to expect:
- It tells you nothing about when the traffic was generated. A strong day here can come from leads bought months ago.
- A transaction created as pending stays on its creation day even after it is later approved or rejected.
Approval time
Everything is reported on the day the transaction result was decided, whether that decision was approve or reject.
Use it when:
- You are calculating payouts and issuing invoices.
- You are closing a month and need numbers that will not move afterwards.
- You need to see when decisions were actually made, for example how long an advertiser is sitting on pending transactions.
What to expect:
- Transactions still pending do not appear, because there is no decision to date them by. They show up on the day they get one.
- A rejection lands on the day it was rejected, not the day the sale was reported. Combine this with the Result Type Filter to separate approved from rejected.
- Transactions that are approved automatically are decided at the moment they are created, so for those the approval time and the transaction time are the same. See Auto-approve transactions.
Which one to use
- Buying and optimising traffic: origin time.
- Watching results arrive: transaction time.
- Paying partners and invoicing advertisers: approval time.
Comparing numbers
- Do not compare two periods across two different bases. The same transaction can appear in September on one basis and in October on another.
- When your numbers do not match an advertiser or an affiliate, check the basis before checking the data. It is the most common reason two correct reports disagree.
- The Transactions report carries all three dates per row, so you can always see where a specific transaction falls on each basis.
