We always strive to reach the maximum transparency possible here at 2Performant. We love data and we want to share it with our users as often as we can.

So, starting today, we have a set of new indicators for each program, available in the listing and/or in the affiliate program detail page.

Health

We have replaced the balance score, which seemed a bit difficult to understand, with a more friendly semaphore-like indicator that should allow affiliates (and advertisers) to get a better understanding of an affiliate program’s financial health, based on its average spend in the last 3 months. It’s not enough to have a fat account balance, if the commissions keep rolling in.

This indicator has 5 possible values:

• green – when the program is doing OK financially and it has enough money to cover for commissions
• yellow – when we estimate that the program’s balance should last about 10 more days
• orange – when we estimate that the program’s balance should last about another week
• red – if the program is in danger of being shut down in the next 3 days
• black – if the program is suspended due to lack of funds

As an affiliate who drives paid traffic to the advertiser’s website, it’s easier to understand that you don’t have to worry about pausing your campaign if the program you promote has a green balance indicator. Also, as an advertiser, it’s easier to learn that you need to feed some cash to your balance so that you’ll keep having happy affiliates.

Time to payment

All affiliates love a short ROI cycle. The sooner they cash in their investments, the more likely it is for them to keep promoting an affiliate program.

So for each program we now display the duration it takes for the commissions to be payable to the affiliates, on average. This is to say that if a program has registered 500 commissions, 400 of which the advertiser accepted exactly 4 days after each of their registration, then the time to payment should be 4 days.

If the advertiser accepted 200 of them in exactly 4 days after their registration and the other 200 in exactly 6 days, then the time to payment should be 5 days. And so on. We know you’re smart (that’s why you work with us, after all), so by now you should have already got the hang of this.

Uptime/Downtime

Again, no affiliate wants to promote an advertiser without getting results. That’s why it’s called performance marketing.

So it’s understandable that affiliates are more likely to avoid promoting programs which are prone to being suspended due to lack of funds. That’s why we decided to inform affiliates about the percentage of the last 6 months in which a program has been suspended due to lack of funds.

New advertisers, fret not! Although your program may have been active for only a couple of weeks, this indicator will only refer to the time frame when your program should have been up, i.e. after activation. So for instance if you’ve activated your program 2 weeks ago and you have never been suspended due to lack of funds, then you’ll have a calculated uptime of 100%, regardless of the fact that 2 weeks is only ~8% of 6 months.

Wrap-up

We hope these new indicators will be of use to you all and help you yield more conversions.

If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it in the comments below