Bringing Payments Insights to the Rest of Your Business: Practical Applications of Downloaded Peacock Data

Peacock by Pagos is a powerful tool for not only aggregating all your payments data from multiple data sources, but for visualizing every aspect of your payments performance in expertly designed dashboards. But the level of control and analytic prowess Peacock gives you over your payments data doesn’t stop there; Peacock also allows you to download the exact data sets used to generate each visualization.

There are several different places in Peacock from which you can download data and multiple ways you can use that information. In this blog post, we’ll explore how valuable it can be to have your data available at your fingertips with just a click, and then outline the features of Peacock that boost the value of your downloaded data. Let’s dive in!

Downloading Dashboard Data

We’ve organized Peacock into a series of dashboards, each containing unique sets of payments data visualizations. The Home dashboard in the Home page of your Peacock Service Panel contains six charts, offering a basic overview of your payment performance. In the Dashboards section, you’ll find Standard dashboards—our pre-made collections of visualizations—and Custom dashboards, where you can manually curate sets of visuals filtered to your own needs. 

When exploring any of the charts and tables in these dashboards, you’ll notice they all have a … icon in the top-right corner.

When you click this icon, a drop-down menu appears containing the option to download the data from that chart. Click Download to choose from our three different options of data to download:

• Raw Data: A CSV file of the raw data imported from your payment processors and displayed in this chart This includes the actual response codes that we receive from any providers connected to Peacock.

• Aggregated Data: A CSV file of the data displayed in this chart after we aggregated and normalized your raw data

• Chart: A PNG image file of this chart, which is a great tool for executive-level reporting or business reviews. You can easily add these visualizations to your slide decks or send via email

Using Downloaded Dashboard Data

To demonstrate the value of downloaded data, let’s walk through a use case involving decline codes. Businesses can identify opportunities to improve transaction authorization rates and drive revenue by analyzing decline code data. A decline code is typically a two-digit, alphanumeric error code that indicates why a card transaction has been declined. The code can originate from a number of sources, including the issuing bank, payment processor, or card brand. Because decline codes differ with each source, it can be hard to analyze your declines all together. That’s where Pagos harmonization comes in; after we ingest your data, we harmonize similar codes together so you can compare your data apples-to-apples. That harmonized data is what you see displayed in the Decline Codes dashboard and in the Aggregated Data downloaded from those charts.

Using the Raw Data download option, you can also explore all your decline code data as it was imported directly from your data sources. You’ll want to do this whenever you need to dig into the specifics of a particular decline trend. Take processor_risk_rule: this is the Pagos normalized decline code given to all transactions that were declined due to one of your processor’s specific risk rules. If you see a spike in these declines in your Decline Codes Transactions chart, for example, you could download the raw data from that chart to dig into what exact processor experienced the decline increase and because of what risk rule. This also gives you the exact language to use when reaching out to that processor for more information.

The uses for downloaded data don’t stop there! Once you download aggregated or raw data from a Peacock chart, you can:

• Import it into tools like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets for custom analyzation, or to combine it with internal proprietary information (if you’re not importing transaction Metadata into Pagos)

• Share it with other teams across your organization that don't have Pagos access or integrate it into internal workflows

• Report data to Monthly Business Review or other business reviews 

The Know Your Data Section

The Know Your Data section of Peacock acts as a supplement to the various dashboards described above. Instead of displaying your data in visualizations, these pages contain tables breaking down your overall payments data by some of the key data parameters attached to your transaction records. There are three key parameters you can investigate in Know Your Data: BINs, Soft Descriptors, and Metadata. The foundation of this analysis is that you can sort your BINs, Soft Descriptors, and Metadata by valuable payments metrics like transaction count, approved transaction value, chargeback rate, and more.

This way you can identify segments of your transactions that are great opportunities for your business (e.g. BINs with the highest transaction value), or are underperforming and need to be monitored more closely (e.g. BINs with the highest chargeback rate). Knowing this information sets you up for success when filtering your payments data in Peacock to look for trends or opportunities. You can learn more about the Know Your Data section in this blog post, and about soft descriptors and metadata in this blog post.  

In all three sections of Know Your Data, you’ll find a green Download button to the right of your screen. If you click on it, it will instantly download the sorted list of parameters with whichever payments metrics you’ve selected.

One of the reasons we have a section of Peacock dedicated to these segments of data is that BINs, Soft Descriptors, and Metadata fields often have very high cardinality values. This means that there are many unique values associated with the field. It’s not uncommon for a large ecommerce merchant to have tens of thousands of BINs in their transaction volume. The sheer number of BINs can be hard to visualize. Within Know Your Data, you can scroll through the sorted BIN list, but if you truly want to investigate more than your top or bottom 10-20 BINs, it’s easier to manipulate the data if you download it. 

Continuing with the BIN example, if you download the BIN list, you can then look at the distribution of the payments KPIs or group them into cohorts. Say, for example, you group the BINs into quartile cohorts. You can then make custom Views within Peacock so you can filter any payments KPI in any Standard Dashboard chart by the top 25% performing BINs. Why would this be useful to your business? Knowing the quartile distribution of your BINs would allow you to perform a top-level trend analysis—giving you leading indicators of where your transaction volume is processed, by whom, and any pitfalls that occur along the way.

Empowering Your Payments Stack With Data

Peacock by Pagos has multiple uses and applications that contribute to you gaining a better understanding of your payments processing in today’s digital landscape. With this knowledge, you can identify problems and implement solutions to decrease costs, improve customer experiences, and increase revenue. But Peacock’s impressive capabilities extend far beyond the functionality of the product itself. Using the download feature available on each Peacock chart and data table, you can even export your raw or harmonized payments data for use in whatever way your business needs. Manipulate the data using your own data analytics tools, supplement it with your internal business information, or share it across your organization for wider consumption—the options are endless.

Are you ready to take your payments stack to the next level with clean, harmonized payments data?