Reading reports by sub-ID and site

Country, device and format tell you who saw your ad. Sub-ID and site tell you where they saw it. For most campaigns the second question is where the money is won or lost, because two sources in the same country can perform very differently. This guide covers how source reports work in UluMob and how to turn a row into a decision.

What a sub-ID and a site are

A site is a publisher's verified website. Reports show it by domain, so you can see where your ad actually ran.

A sub-ID is a traffic source id that the publisher passes with each request. A publisher with several traffic sources, or several sections of one site, uses sub-IDs to tell them apart. You can pass it on to your own tracker with the {subid} macro, alongside {zone_id} and {domain}.

A zone is one placement: one format on one site. It sits between the two, and you can group by it in either kind of report.

Two kinds of report

UluMob keeps two sets of statistics, and every report is read from one of them:

Report dimension	Daily statistics	Source statistics
Date	Yes	Yes
Campaign	Yes	Yes
Zone	Yes	Yes
Country	Yes	No
Format	Yes	No
OS	Yes	No
Device	Yes	No
Ad	Yes	No
Site	No	Yes
Sub-ID	No	Yes

As soon as you group or filter by site or sub-ID, the report switches to source statistics. Those do not carry country, format, OS, device or ad, so a report that asks for both is refused with a message saying the two cannot be combined. In the panel, the buttons for the other set are disabled once you pick one.

This is a deliberate trade. Splitting every source by every country, device and ad would multiply the rows until the report became unreadable, and the decisions you make from it are different anyway. You block or keep a source; you bid on a country.

How to read a source report

1. Pick one campaign. Select it in the filter, or add campaign to the grouping. A source report across all campaigns mixes offers and hides what each source does for a specific one.
2. Group by zone or sub-ID, and add date if you want to see a trend. You can group by up to four dimensions at once, over a range of up to 92 days.
3. Sort by cost. Start with the rows that spent the most. A source that spent little has not told you much yet.
4. Read conversions next to cost. If your postback is set up, conversions appear on each row. Divide cost by conversions to get the cost per conversion for that source and compare it with your target.
5. Check the fraud events column. It counts events the filters flagged on that source. Flagged traffic is not billed, but a source with many flagged events is worth watching closely.

If you want both views, run them one after the other: the country report to set bids, then the source report to decide which sources to keep. If you need sources split by country, pass {geo} and {subid} to your tracker and make that cut there.

Blocking a source from a row

When the report shows a single campaign and is grouped by zone or sub-ID, each row has a Block source button.

• Blocking a zone adds it to the campaign's zone blacklist and removes it from the campaign's allow list if it was there.
• Blocking a sub-ID adds it to the campaign's sub-ID exclude list. If the campaign buys from an include list of sub-IDs instead, the sub-ID is removed from that list.

Serving changes at once, and the campaign does not go back to review. If the sub-ID you block is the only one an include-list campaign buys, the panel refuses and asks you to pause the campaign instead, since blocking it would leave nothing to buy.

Before you block, decide your threshold. A common rule is to block a source once it has spent a set multiple of your target cost per conversion without converting. Writing the rule down before you look at the report keeps decisions consistent.

Saved source lists

Blocking from a row changes one campaign. If you run several campaigns on the same traffic, save your decisions in a source list instead. A list holds zones, domains, sub-IDs, ISPs or IP ranges, either to buy only from them or never to buy from them, with up to 10,000 items per list.

List type	Use it to
Zones, include or exclude	Keep a set of proven placements, or a set of placements you never want
Domains, include or exclude	Act on whole sites by domain
Sub-IDs, include or exclude	Act on traffic sources across sites
ISPs, exclude	Avoid networks that do not convert for you
IPs, allow or block	Narrow or exclude specific address ranges

Attach a list to as many campaigns as you like. Editing it updates every campaign that uses it, so a new campaign can start with everything you have learned already excluded.

A practical routine:

1. Each week, run the source report for each live campaign.
2. Block clear losers from the report rows.
3. Copy the zones and sub-IDs that failed in more than one campaign into a shared exclude list.
4. Copy the sources that converted well into an include list, and use it for a separate campaign with a higher bid.

Pass sources to your tracker too

UluMob reports show cost and the conversions your postback sent back. Your tracker may know more, such as revenue per conversion or events further down the funnel. Pass {zone_id}, {subid} and {domain} in the destination URL so the tracker can break results down the same way, and use {cost} to send what each click or open cost. The macros list has the full set, and postback setup covers the return path.

Summary

• Source reports (site and sub-ID) and daily reports (country, format, OS, device, ad) are separate and cannot be combined in one view.
• Read source reports for one campaign at a time, sorted by cost.
• Block from a row for one campaign; use saved source lists for decisions that apply to many.

If you are not buying yet, open an account and the reports are there from your first impression.