Correcting Doubled Revenue

There may be times that you see doubled or otherwise inflated conversions and revenue within the platform. This can happen:

  • If a revenue file is inadvertently uploaded twice in Add mode.
  • If the time zone of your publisher (eg. Google) account is changed somehow (by team on purpose or by the publisher) around the time of a revenue upload, mostly around midnight in the account time zone, and easily result a duplicate upload.

If these changes to revenue are unexplained, you may want to correct the uploaded revenue file so that your data is accurate.

How To Fix 

  • First, if it is not a manual duplicate upload, then please ensure that the time zone in your publisher account is set correctly to avoid this happening again. You may need to contact the publisher to find out why this change occurred.
  • Next, you’ll need to negate the duplicate upload by following the steps below.

How To Correct A Doubled Revenue File 

Find out the revenue file(s) you want to back out. It can happen with more than one file. They must be uploaded with “SUM” mode in the first time, so the sequence of them to be backed out is irrelevant unless there is another mode (eg. Overwrite)

To back out a revenue file, follow these simple steps:

  • Click the Admin link in the upper right to go to the Activity Log, then download the relevant revenue file.
  • Open the revenue file in Microsoft Excel or a similar spreadsheet program.
  • Delete the column labeled Result.

    Note: If you have any fields that show #NAME in the Keyword column, do a Find and Replace and replace all with single quote '
  • Change the file name prefix as one of below
    • bulkrevenuenegate_ : this is NEGATE option for revenue files which provide object ids directly such as Creative ID, Group ID
    • bulkrevenuecampaignstructurenegate_ : this is NEGATE option for revenue file which provide the campaign structure such as Account, Campaign, Group
    • trackerrevenuenegate_ : this is NEGATE option for tracker revenue files
  • Upload the revenue file via FTPthe revenue file should be processed quite immediately once dropped.
    • Dropping the file under the main client directory (which is using tracking id of the client) if it is a direct revenue file with format that Marin Supports.
  • Back in the Activity Log, you should see a record of “Revenue Upload - Negate”.

Once the job has finished processing, all of the data should then be backed out (corrected) and your revenue and conversion data should once again be accurate.

Note: This same process may be used to delete or remove revenue for keywords. If you do not upload a new revenue file, the values will remain negated.

Written by Marketing @ Marin Software

Last published at: June 30th, 2023