STREAMLINING YOUR PERFORMANCE WITH STATS
21 August 2015
Admin
Growing your Affiliate income is about constantly improving. Finding ways to get the best out of your marketing efforts is how to ensure the commissions keep flowing. This tutorial is for people who have established a stream of income as an Affiliate and will go through ways in which they can go about improving that income.
Streamlining your Affiliate performance is all about statistics. At some stage you are going to have to come to terms with the statistical reporting options from within your Affiliate account. Let's concentrate on the basic statistics from your reporting options and what that can tell you about your own performance.
Program Wide Performance
If you log in and go to "Reporting" in the menu and then "View Sent Traffic Summary Report" in the popup sub-menu, you will get your basic performance statistics. This page can tell you your impressions, clicks, sales and leads and the amount you earned for any given period across the whole program.
Select Your Program-wide Reporting Options
Impressions: Amount of times you displayed a Merchant banner. (Note: Clicks are only recorded for banners - not text links).
Clicks: The amount of times visitors clicked on banners or text links you displayed.
Sales / Leads: The number of transactions you sent to your Merchants.
Amount Earned: Self explanatory
These statistics are the basic starting points for the overall performance of your Affiliate marketing efforts. The higher all of these numbers, the better!
Now the first two statistics should be the first things you look at. Clicks vs. Impressions expressed as a percentage is how your click through rate (CTR) is worked out. A standard website with a few banners will usually produce a CTR of between 0.5% and 1.5% and so if your CTR is on the lower side of that, there is a prime opportunity to improve it. In fact we already have another tutorial on improving your CTR.
Now you can also figure out the conversion rate of traffic you send to your merchants on this page. That is a factor of clicks vs. Sales/Leads. If you have one sale or lead for every 100 clicks then the traffic you are sending to your Merchants is converting at 1%. This statistic will vary depending on how targeted and how presold that traffic is. If you trick people into clicking on your links with a dishonest description of what they are going to, then your conversion rate will be very low. If you give them a thorough description with prices and a clear indication that they are going to purchase something, then your conversion rates will be reasonably high. You can read more in our tutorial about targeted traffic.
Specific Merchant Program Statistics
Sometimes you will find that a specific program outperforms the others or one that isn't performing as well as you had hoped. Once again, you can use the statistics options to identify the areas in which you can improve the performance of your marketing for that specific Merchant.
ust log in to your account and go to "Reporting" then to "Advanced Program Reporting" in the popup sub-menu. On the next page you can bring up the statistics for any specific Merchant program that you are promoting. The basic statistic types remain the same - impressions, clicks, sales etc though you can also elect to generate reports with your CTR and EPC (Estimated Payout per 100 Visitors) statistics too.
Select the Merchant Program and Which Stats to View
Once again, use these statistics to identify weaknesses or strengths in your promotion of that specific Merchant and then take appropriate action. If the statistic for your impressions is low, then you need to drive more traffic to the pages with your Affiliate banners on them. If your CTR is below 0.5% then there is plenty of room for improvement. If the conversion of your traffic into sales is low, then you need to consider how to improve that from your end - this could possibly be improved through better copywriting on your site.
The key is to take tangible steps to improve each statistic. If you are not sure how to improve your stats in each area then review the appropriate tutorials on clixGaloreTutor or go to forums and ask how other people are doing it. By constantly improving your performance in each area, you will eventually improve the statistic that really counts - sales!
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