Performance reports & exclusive rates for Rakuten Merchants - Audience Engine

Skimlinks offers full transparency on which Publishers are driving sales to Rakuten merchants via the reports in Rakuten's interface.  You can download a report that contains commissions with the Skimlinks domain name / Parent domain from Rakuten.

1. Log in to Advertiser Dashboard
2. Select "Reports" > "Reporting" from top nav
3. Under "Choose Report" select any report (minus the Media Optimization or Multi-Touch Commission Reports)
4. Set your Date Range
5. Under "Add and Remove Columns" on the right side of the Reporting UI, select any columns in the section titled "Sub-Network"
6. Drag & Drop added columns to the desired position in the report
7. Select "View Report" 

For the Referring URL, when you pull a signature activity/order reports in Rakuten, you can add a "Referrer URL" field and often see which page a sale came from. 

Setting up Exclusive rates via Audience Engine

Our integration with Rakuten allows merchants to set up unique rates per website using Audience Engine functionality in the Rakuten interface. A Merchant needs to enable this feature in Rakuten. Please ask your Rakuten AM to set this up.

Commissioning List Upload

1. Login to the advertiser dashboard

2. Select “Offers” then “Commissioning Lists”

3. Select “Create commissioning lists”

4. Choose field “Publisher’s Audience”

5. Unless you are expecting an audience list to act as a control group - please leave the “is control” unchecked.

6. Upload a list of Parent domains that you want to receive a specific rate. It must be a TXT file where each parent domain is in a separate line without any punctuation.

7. Input a name  (e.g. Skimlinks_ManagedPublishers_12312023).

8. Click “Create”

9. Repeat for any additional audience engine lists you may need to upload if multiple. Your Audience Engine commissioning list is now created and ready to be used in an offer.

Offer Creation

The steps to creating an offer follow our standard dynamic commissioning offer steps. A few key points are listed below:

Rule Priority

When creating offers - at the rule creation screen - ensure you have the correct priority in your rule set. Rules run Top to Bottom so the lowest priority is at the top, the highest priority is at the bottom. This will allow you to prioritize your rules in a way that gives priority to certain rules over others.

Offer Creation steps:

1. At the Offer page, select Create New Offer

2. Set the start/end date according to the terms agreed to with the publisher

3. Select the "Dynamic Commissioning" checkbox

4. Set any additional settings you may want and click “Next”

5. Set the baseline rate

6. Select "% of last sale" and "add rule"

7. Select "Publisher’s Audience"

8. Select "is on the list"

9. Select the commissioning list from the publisher that you previously uploaded that you wish to commission on

10. Set the commission rate as agreed.

11. Repeat steps 5-8 for all desired audiences and/or rules

a. Please remember you can re-arrange your rule priority such that rules at the bottom at the highest priority.

12. Launch the offer

13. Extend the offer to the publisher

The Publishers receiving these exclusive will see the new rate in their Publisher Hub within 24 hours once the rate is active. Please reach out to your Rakuten Account Manager with any questions.