New Reports Page

If you've logged in to the Cubics UI over the last few weeks, you may have seen a few changes. In particular, I wanted to talk about the new Publisher Reports page in detail.

The screen has two significant new features: Filtering and Grouping. Our previous filtering was limited to one channel and one application. If you had three applications and you wanted to break them out, you had to run the report three times. That's changed.

Here's a screenshot of the new reports:

From a developer's perspective, the setup is pretty easy. Filters are like WHERE clauses and Grouping is like GROUP BY. If you want to select more than one item in a filters box hold the CTRL key and click on each of the items to include.

So what's it good for?
The primary benefit is obviously to be able to report across apps and placements. Common reports you can run: earnings/CPM last week for each app, earnings/CPMs for each channel or placement in your app, break out quality by Ad Size.

What about my old reports page?
The new stats begin at October 10, 2008. For older stats use the account summary report link.

A couple of key things here:

Applications
There's a blog post here on how to set up Applications for your account. You may need to update your ad code, but this extra information will help our system to optimize your inventory.

Channels
Many publishers are not taking advantage of the Channels feature, but it's worth knowing about. A Channel is effectively a "virtual group" that you set up. Channels are there to let you up granularity on your reporting.

The simplest case for channels is simply to name each spot on your app. So you could have channels like "MyApp_Main_Top" and "MyApp_Profile_Right". Doing this makes it easy to report on which ad placements are performing or even seeing much traffic.

To add channels to your existing ad code, just set the Channel variable or parameter as highlighted in these two examples:


<fb:iframe src="'http://cubics.com/displayAd.aspx?pid="20311&plid="18542&adSize="728x90&bgColor="%23ffffff&textColor="%23000000&linkColor="%230033ff&channel=MyChannelName&appid=506' width='728' height='90' frameborder='0' border='0' scrolling='no'></fb:iframe>

<!--- Cubics.com Ad Code START -->
<script type="text/javascript">
var pid = 20311;
var appId = 506;
var plid = 18542;
var adSize = "728x90";
var linkColor = "%230033ff";
var textColor = "%23000000";
var bgColor = "%23ffffff";
var channel = "My Channel Name";
var frameSize = "728x90";
</script>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://cubics.com/displayAd.js"> </script>
<!--- Cubics.com Ad Code END -->

We think the reporting setup is reasonably intuitive, but please drop us a line if you have any questions or issues making any of this work.