A Beginner’s Guide to the ZetPulse Dashboard
Overview is the one screen to check daily. Campaigns is where you create and adjust, Rewards tracks points and payout history, and Settings is where you must set a payout method before your first threshold.
The dashboard is deliberately small — four tabs, each with one job. This is what each is for, and which parts matter in your first week.
Overview
Your at-a-glance view: spend, verified actions, and reward balance for the current period. If you check one screen a day, make it this one.
The reason it is the daily screen is that it answers the only question that needs daily answering: is anything obviously wrong? A campaign that has stopped spending, a verified-action count that has flatlined, or a balance that has not moved all week are all visible here in a few seconds.
What it will not tell you is whether a change worked. That needs a week of data and the Campaigns tab. Resist the urge to draw conclusions from the Overview screen — it is a smoke alarm, not a diagnostic.
Three things worth reading here:
- Spend against daily budget. If you are consistently underspending, your targeting is too narrow. Loosen the narrowest filter, not the bid.
- Verified actions, not clicks. Clicks moving without verified actions moving means traffic is arriving and doing nothing.
- Seven-day trend, if shown. Daily figures swing for reasons unrelated to your campaign.
Campaigns
Create, pause and edit campaigns here. Each campaign row shows its status, daily budget and cost per verified action.
Cost per verified action is the column to sort by. It is directly comparable across campaigns in a way that cost per click is not, and it is the number that tells you where to move budget.
The pause control matters more than it looks. Being able to stop spend instantly is a basic requirement of controlling a campaign — if a landing page breaks or you spot a problem in the brief, pausing is the correct first move, not adjusting.
For a first campaign, the settings that matter most are:
- Objective — traffic, sign-ups or reviews. Changes how the campaign optimises.
- Daily budget — start at $10-$25 while you find your cost per verified action.
- Targeting — two filters at most to begin with.
- The brief — one specific question. This drives review quality more than any other field.
Rewards
Publishers track points, thresholds and payout history here. Advertisers see what their spend actually bought.
For publishers, three numbers matter: current point balance, the threshold for your chosen payout method, and your approval rate. The third is the one people ignore and the one that determines earnings — rejected work costs the same time and pays nothing, and a low approval rate limits which campaigns you are offered.
Rejections appear here with a reason attached. Read them. A rejection reason is free coaching, and most publishers who plateau are repeating one fixable mistake.
Reward crediting follows verification, so a review submitted today may take a day or two to appear. That lag is normal.
For advertisers, this tab is where spend becomes concrete: which reviews you paid for, and what they said. It is worth reading in full rather than in aggregate — the value of a review campaign is in the specifics, and aggregate counts hide them.
Settings
Account details, payout methods and notification preferences. Set your payout method before your first threshold is reached to avoid delays.
That is the single most common avoidable delay for new publishers. The balance is credited, the threshold is met, and there is nowhere to send it. Two minutes now saves a week later.
The three payout methods have different thresholds and timings:
| Method | Minimum | Processing |
|---|---|---|
| Wallet Credit | $5 | Instant |
| Gift Card | $10 | Instant |
| Direct Deposit | $25 | 3–5 business days |
Notification preferences are worth tuning rather than leaving default. You can set a reward threshold and be notified only for campaigns above it, instead of for everything — which turns notifications from noise into a genuine campaign feed.
A First-Week Routine
Day 1. Settings first: payout method, notification threshold. Then create the campaign or attach your site.
Days 2-7. Overview once a day, thirty seconds. Do not change anything.
Day 8. Campaigns tab. Sort by cost per verified action, read the reviews in Rewards, then make one change.
That is genuinely the whole routine. The most common dashboard mistake is checking it too often and acting on incomplete data — verification lag means the picture at hour twelve is not the picture at day three.
Troubleshooting
A few things that look like bugs and are not:
Clicks are rising but verified actions are flat. Traffic is arriving and not doing anything. This is a landing page or brief problem, not a targeting one. Walk the page yourself on a phone.
The campaign stopped spending mid-week. Usually the daily budget was reached, or a filter is now excluding most of the available pool. Check spend against daily budget on the Overview screen first.
A review appears in Rewards but the balance has not changed. Crediting follows verification. Give it a day or two; if it was rejected, the reason is attached.
Cost per verified action jumped after a budget increase. Expected behaviour when scaling. A larger budget reaches further into the publisher pool, and marginal publishers perform differently from your best. Step back down and scale in 25% increments instead.
The dashboard shows matched campaigns but you got no notification. Check your notification reward threshold in Settings — matches below it appear in the dashboard without notifying you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which screen should I check daily?
Overview, and only briefly. It is a smoke alarm for obvious problems, not a diagnostic. Real decisions need a week of data from the Campaigns tab.
Where do I set my payout method?
Settings. Do it before your first threshold is reached — an unset payout method is the most common cause of a delayed first payment.
Can I pause a campaign instantly?
Yes, from the Campaigns tab. If a landing page breaks or you spot a problem in the brief, pausing is the correct first move rather than adjusting settings.
Why does cost per verified action differ so much between my campaigns?
Package choice affects it directly — traffic actions are cheap and shallow, engagement actions are expensive and detailed. Compare campaigns within the same package, not across.
Related Reading
Getting started with ZetPulse campaigns is the full campaign walkthrough. Reading your analytics covers what the numbers mean, and publisher rewards: how payouts work covers the payout side in detail.
For what changed in the current dashboard, see the new dashboard analytics release and the latest ZetPulse app features.
Further Reading
