How long does it generally take for the reports on an aff. network (I'm using Linkshare) to reflect impressions, click-throughs, and sales? Is it instantaneous for impressions and click-throughs?
So it's not generally instant? I just can't find any information on Linkshare about how recent the stats are (for instance, in google adwords they warn you that the stats are about 3 hours old), so that tends to lead me to believe that the stats should be instant...except they don't seem to reflect clicks/impressions I myself have made, let alone all my traffic from adwords.
As a manager at Acclaim Network, I can tell you that it varies based on merchants, the products they sell and the Network. We update statistiscs daily but many of our financial merchants report statistics back to us on a weekly basis since processing / approval of financial products (credit cards) usually does not occur instantly online -- they check many other things. So some merchants provide daily sales/leads stats, others weekly. It varies. Once you identify products that work for you and know what you make from various traffic sources, it does not affect your business model greatly whether reporting is daily or weekly.
Thanks for the comment acclaim. As it turns out, according to discussions at abestweb forum, the linkshare reports are broken and have been for a few weeks now. It does affect your business model when you are trying to test landing pages etc. and need data, if not on conversions, than at least on click-throughs. If I don't even know how many people clicked through my link to the merchants site, I cannot test. While merchants can't tell you about conversions right away, they should tell you about numbers of forms filled out etc. to give you an idea if you're on the right track.
I would agree that it depends on each affiliate network as they all have their own rules in place. It normally happens a few times a day or every 24 hours with most networks. Some update in a few minutes to 1 hour delay in stats reporting, but then they always sometimes take some earnings away due to fraudulent sales, charge backs, etc.
Still no Linkshare reports. What I've learned in all this is that I really like ShareASale. "Real-time reporting" just sounds like another throwaway bullet point in a sales pitch but it really really is wonderful after trying to deal with linkshare.