We here at HitPath know and love data – and we are excited to announce that we have made major updates to our Reporting API to allow both you and your affiliates to easily and more efficiently access the data you need to manage and optimize your traffic.
Later this week, you will be able to:
1. Pull real-time data – you should expect to see daily stats from your internal interface displaying on the API within minutes, instead of hourly.
2. Pull reports more often – reports can now be pulled up to twice every 5 minutes (6 times more often than before)!
3. Get your data faster – report generation processes have been amped up so your files gets returned faster than ever.
4. More efficient data return – based on client feedback, reports are no longer zipped by default and have been streamlined to make it easier to parse and analyze.
In addition to these huge improvements to the data generation, we do want to make you aware of some minor changes that may need to be accommodated for, to help facilitate communication with your affiliates and your tech team. Full API documentation is available by contacting support@hitpath.com, who can also help you with frequently asked questions.
In general, the calls used to our API will not need to be changed or updated in the slightest; the same URL structure and parameters are still utilized. However, some small changes have been implemented in order to keep up with standard best API practices, the primary of which is that the date field, which was previously optional, is now required. We are now also limiting data formatting returns to csv and xml types, while deprecating several older and rarely used formats.
For affiliates, there should be no changes in output (data returned, columns, etc.) other than the fact that the file returned is no longer zipped by default, in order to make it easier to access and script for the data. We find most affiliates are currently using the optional unzipped setting already.
For the admin side API reporting for internal stats, please note that there is a structural change in the way the returned file and the data output. Rather than a zipped folder with individual folders and files for each specific affiliate’s stats, the system will now return a single unzipped file with all affiliates combined into a single document. There will now also be an “agentid” column to provide affiliate id information. We do apologize for the fact that this may require some modification of your scripts. However, this format in the long run should make it simpler to parse as needed and give you more flexibility with the data.
As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team (either at support@hitpath.com or by clicking on the “Chat Now” button in your system) with any questions!
