The logs

A summary tells you a campaign is behaving oddly. It cannot tell you why, because the cause is almost always visible on individual rows and invisible in any total. These four screens are one row at a time.

#The clicks log

Every click as it arrived, newest first, over the range on screen.

The columns you can turn on cover four groups, and knowing they exist is most of the value — the default view shows a fraction of them:

Bot reason is the one people do not know to look for. A click excluded from your totals says here which signal excluded it, rather than leaving you to guess whether the traffic or the tracker is at fault.

Sent to is where that visitor actually ended up — the offer or lander the paths chose for them. On a campaign with a rotation, this is how you check the split is really splitting.

#The conversions log

Every postback that landed. This is the screen for the case where a network's statement and your revenue disagree.

Columns: When, Status, Payout, Currency, Campaign, Click ID, Conversion ID, Goal.

Status is the one that earns its place. A conversion held as pending because the network sent a word the mapping does not recognise looks exactly like a conversion the network has not approved yet — same row, same absence from revenue, completely different fix. This is the only screen where the difference is visible. See the four states.

Click ID is what to compare when a network insists it fired a postback you cannot find. A conversion for a click id this tracker never issued is recorded and marked rather than dropped, so "we sent it" and "we never got it" can actually be settled.

#Repeat addresses

One row per IP address, counted over the whole range, worst first.

The clicks log answers "what happened on this click" and genuinely cannot answer "which address keeps hitting me" — that question has a different shape, and at any volume a single address among fifty thousand rows is not something anybody spots.

The two columns that matter most sit next to each other on purpose: Hits and Over, the span they arrived across. Twelve hits in one second and twelve hits over a fortnight are the same number and nothing alike.

Also here: Rate, Repeats, Bots, Sales, Cost, Campaigns, Country, ISP, ASN, Flagged for, First hit, Last hit, Uniques, LP clicks. Cost against Sales on one address is the fastest read on whether a repeat is a problem or a customer.

#Allow and deny lists

Rules that decide what gets through before anything else runs.

Each entry is an attribute, an operator and a value — IP equals this, country in that list — plus a note saying why it exists. New entries default to deny, which is the safer default: an allow rule written by accident silently narrows everything you accept.

Write the note. Six months on, a deny rule with no reason beside it is one nobody dares remove and nobody can justify, and that is how a list becomes permanent.

#Which one to open