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Why reporting should not be used to determine billing numbers

Why reporting should not be used to determine billing numbers

Owned by Tobias Rast
Last updated: Jan 03, 2023
2 min read

The general assumption is: The payment entry or the invoice for one month should match the numbers shown in the reporting for this month.

Please be aware: In most cases this is not the case. There are multiple reasons for this.

How to check payment entries/ invoices

Every billing document contains conversions, clicks, transactions etc. Those conversions etc. are part of the billing document. Every conversion can only be paid out once! So, as soon as it is part of one billing document, it cannot become part of another one!

The conversions, clicksums, etc. that are part of a payment entry/ invoice can be found in a csv file that is attached to every billing document. It contains all data in a very granular way, which allows to check on conversion level if everything is complete. Excel may be a good helper for this task.

 

Why the Reporting cannot and should not be used to determine the billing numbers

Timezone

  • The reporting is fixed to the timezone Europe/Berlin (CET), whereas the billing processes in the backend work in UTC.

Filters

  • The reporting in the UI does not contain deactivated or deleted advertisers by default. Also deleted and deactivated partners are hidden by default. They can be included using the filter options.

  • Also, it can happen that conversions are more or less arbitrarily included in payment entries due to conversion processing of advertisers and platform owners. Example: single conversions from month ago can be included in payments for operational reasons on advertiser side.

Ordering in reporting

  • Ordering data over many pages (pagination) does only affect the currently viewed page, and does not sort the data globally.

Rights&Roles

  • The Access Rights & Roles system might reduce the view of entities, advertisers, and partners in reporting

Dimensions

  • Sub-IDs: The Reporting UI does not show smc2 (3/4/5/6) values.

  • Transactions (billing positions) are not shown in the Reporting

Remarks about the data base in reporting

  • Does not show/include clicks without an AMC-Code an, because they are not assigned to a relationship/adspace/partner.

  • Does not contain unattributed, analytical conversions in the Number column.

  • Does not contain by default the attributed analytical conversions in the Number columns

    • They are only shown/summed if the filter Conversion Targets is used and analytcal Conversion Targets are included

  • Does not contain unattributed, commercial conversions in the Number column.

  • Does not contain conversions with errors. You can find them here: https://<your-ui-domain>/app/index.html#/reporting/transaction-errors

  • Does not show untracked data

  • Does not show page impressions

  • Does not show uncategorized data