ATX v2 - stats - out list

This page displays the current outlist, plus several tools to modify the placement of trades in the outlist.
Make sure that you fully understand the outlist concept before changing the settings

outlist concept
Every time a surfer clicks a link on your server that links through out.cgi, ATX loads the outlist.
The outlist is a list of all your active trades, with a certain amount of points assigned to them.
The points represent the urgency at which traffic should be send to the particular trade
The better the trade, the more points it gets, and the more likely it is to receive traffic.

The points every trade receives gets re-calculated every minute by the ATX cron.
ATX gathers dozens of different variables, the performance of all trades, its historical performance,
your settings for all trade, etc. With all these numbers, it is able to make an accurate judgement about the value of a trade,
and it boils it down to a single number; the points

This is where the outgoing slots come in.
You can directly edit how many points (and thus how much % of the available traffic) a trade should receive.
For example, giving slot #1 80% of the points will result in a massive amount of traffic going to your best trades,
but probably won't leave enough traffic for your other trades.
As you can imagine, different settings wil results in very different results.
But using trial & error here is not a smart thing to do since it will most likely kill your site
before you are able to find the best settings. That's why it's important to read this page as it offers some guide-lines.

Current outlist settings
The outlist contains more than just your trades, it also instructs ATX how to deal with certain types of 'special' traffic.
All the options listed here can be set via ATX - Settings

Traffic Broker Campaigns
New in ATX v2 is the possibility to send a percentage of your traffic to a broker.
All running campaigns are displayed here. You can manage the campaigns in Tools - Broker

Priority Trades
Priority trades: These trades are first considered by ATX for receiving traffic.
They are listed because a force or boost has been enabled for these trades.

Primary Trades
The top 10 (10 being how many slots you have) of your trades, when sorted on overall value, are your primary trades.
ATX will send a surfer to these 10 sites before sending them to trades of lesser value, which are the secondary trades.
By changing the slots and their values you change how many trades are in the primary trades list and how much traffic each trade receives.

Secondary Trades
All the trades that didn't make it in the 'primary trades' list this minute are in the secondary trades list.
These trades will receive traffic once a surfer has visited all the trades in the primary list.
Once a surfer has visited all your secondary trades as well, the 'exout' feature kicks in.
Trades that are in the primary or secondary list can also be in the (high)priority list.
Trades that are in the primary list can be in the secondary list the next minute, and vice versa.

Manual point distribution for Primary Trades
The amount of points every slot has is normally filled out automatically by ATX,
but if you prefer it's also possible to take manual control.
By setting the amount of points every slot has, you control how much traffic your trades receive,
as they climb higher and higher in your outlist.
Be sure to always at least have 10 slots, and feel free to go up to 20 slots.
Most important is that your top slots take up a large percentage of the intial traffic.
The top 3 slots combined should take up around 80 - 90%.
This way a quick rotation of your trades is ensured. Plus it allows you to grow
high quality trades that keep on top of your outlist to become as big as can be.

Evaluation Mods
ATX offers great control over its internal algorithms which calculate the value of all trades,
while populating the outlist. By changing the settings here, you change the way ATX evaluates
all of your trades, it changes how much value it assigns to each one.
By default, ATX values trades that have the largest growth potential the most.
You can change this by shifting the focus to producitity, to the amount of hits
a trade returns for every hit it receives, or you can further emphasis the growth
focus by increasing the important of effect.
To see noticable results, change the focus to at least 150%
Make sure that you only change 1 (with a theoretical limit of 2) setting,
otherwise you probably nullify the effect. It's not possible to shift the focus
to return as well as prod, as well the effect of the trade.

Traffic Mods
ATX makes several distinctions between the hits a trade sends to your site.
It looks at the countries the surfers come from, if they have visited your site before
in their browsing session, and if they arrived via a proxy.
The geographical location of the surfers is most important.
You will probably notice that traffic from certain countries performs much better
than traffic from other countries.
To get an initial idea, go to Stats - Main Overview - scroll down to "totals - all traffic"
and select countries from the statistics dropdown list, in the column Settings
ATX will display cgi-bin/a2/x/s_geo.cgi?x=all_traffic. Look at the right table, and notice
the Prod column. It displays the productivity of all surfers, grouped per country.
Notice how certain (groups of) countries perform better than others. Unless your site isn't in english
you will usually find that countries like the US, UK, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands perform the best
You should mark these countries as premium via Tools - Ratings.
Back to the traffic mods, assign a high percentage to premium traffic, so that trades sending
relative large amounts of premium traffic will be assigned more points than trades with low amounts of premium traffic.
Your regular traffic should be around 100%, and the unwanted traffic should be very low.
If you have Chinese traffic marked as unwanted, and somebody is sending you tons of it, he will
receive a great penalty if you give the unwanted category a rating of say 20%.

The same principal applies to low uniques ratings, and high proxy ratings.
Ideally every surfer that you receive to your site is unique, but as you trade within
a circle of sites, the uniques percentage will drop. Trades that send low percentages of
new unique surfers can be given a small penalty. Low uniques / high proxies usually mean the trade is very
bad or even worse, cheating.

Traffic range
While evaluating the quality of a trade, ATX looks at the statistics of each trade during
three different time periods;
how it performed during the last 60 minutes, the last 24 hours, and the last X days
By changing how much every period should weigh, you determine how stable a trade is.
Hourly traffic - When too much focus is placed on the hourly traffic,
the trade becomes very jumpy and goes up and down the outlist like a yoyo.
When the hourly traffic doesn't weigh enough, the trade doesn't react fast enough
to changes from the sending party, and you might miss out on growth, or waste traffic
because a trade has gone south.
Daily traffic - Most important is how a trade has performed during the past 24 hours.
This is a good indication of the quality of the trade. Putting too much focus on 24 hours results
in a very stable trade, which can be a good thing, but too stable means you're limiting its growth potential.
Long term traffi - For extra stability you can use the performance of the traffic from the past X days (7 by default).

We recommend to use 20 - 30% for hourly traffic, 60 - 70% for daily traffic, and 0 - 10% for long term traffic.
More focus on short term traffic increases the growth potential, but also the instability of your trades & site

Trade settings
outlist points calculation - by default ATX fills out the percentages of the outlist slots,
and sets the number of slots. The result can be seen the Primary Trades list
When you set this setting to manual, ATX will use the outlist slots that are set in
Manual point distribution for Primary Trades
click dataIf you prefer, ATX can use either all (effective) clicks that were generated by a trade,
or only use the to-trade clicks. To-trade clicks are all clicks that were sent to trades; either via skimming
or toplist links or full blind links. Since only to-trade hits have the potential to make your site grow,
since return traffic can be expected, these clicks are much more valuable than to-gallery clicks in terms of
site growth. To-gallery clicks - which are joined with to-trade clicks when selecting all clicks have their
own importance while looking at site profit.

return algorithm
ATX v2 includes the return algorithms and functions from earlier ATX versions.
If you wish to use a custom return algorithm, select custom function from this list.
custom function
For more information about the custom return formula, please visit
http://www.arrowscripts.com/atxv2/docs/055.shtml