The IP Report lets you examine Affiliate activity in greater detail. Use it if you notice an Affiliate has begun to generate a lot of clicks or transactions seemingly overnight. Please note that you need to log in to the Advertiser Dashboard to see any help center articles that are linked below.

Here are the steps to run an IP Report for a selected Affiliate:
1. Click IP Report, in the Account area of the Advertiser Homepage.
2. Enter the Affiliate ID number for the Affiliate that you want to run the report on. You can obtain the Affiliate ID in a Sales and Activity Report (see Viewing Reports for details), or by viewing transactions (see Managing your transactions).
3. Enter a date range that suspiciously high activity has occurred in.
4. Click Go.

Please note: Due to volume, this report can only be run for click-throughs in the previous month and the current month.

This generates three separate reports for this Affiliate. You can view these reports on the screen, or you can click the appropriate links under each of them to download them to your computer for later reference. The files will be downloaded inside zip files. To read them, first open the zip files with WinZip or another archive utility. Open the files inside with Excel or another spreadsheet program.

Descriptions of each report follow. Please note: "Count" refers to the number of click-throughs.
IP Report - This report lists the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of all of the computers that have clicked through on the link. If you click on the IP address in this report, you can drill down to the date, username (generated by LinkShare from a cookie on the user's computer), and referring URL. In the case of invalid activity, you may notice a significant number of entries for the same username and/or the same URL within a short period of time. 
Please note: Some ISPs use a range of dynamic IP addresses across their users, so two clicks from the same IP address may not be the same person. Public computers, such as those in libraries, may also cause more than one person to appear at the same IP address.

Username Report - This report lists all of the unique locations that a click was generated from in the given time period. LinkShare sets a cookie on the browser of a computer during a click-through. In the cookie, LinkShare assigns a numeric string of eight or nine numbers that identifies the browser and click-through. Therefore, if you notice a significant amount of click-throughs for one particular username for a short period of time, this could be a sign of invalid activity. Click the username to see the computer's IP address. 
Note: The username feature will not function if the end user has their browser set to not accept cookies. It is possible for the end user to clear their cookies, but given the nature of invalid click-through activity, this is unlikely.

Referral URL Report - This report lists all of the Web pages that referred a particular user to your site. These are typically the pages where you will find a link to your site. Click the Web address to link to the referring site. If "Direct Request" is listed instead of a URL, it indicates that the click did not originate from a Web page (for instance, it came from an Email).
Tip: Use the Referral URL Report to profile sites that are sending you click-throughs. For instance, you might run a Sales and Activity Report to get the ID numbers of your top 10 sites, run IP Reports for those Affiliates, and click on the Referral URLs to see how the links are positioned to your customers.

For greater detail on the IP report, see More information on the IP Report.

.