In this tutorial, I'll be talking about the different ways an affiliate marketer can track their ad campaigns. This is the most important part of affiliate marketing. Know how your ad campaign is working and seeing where you can change or make improvements. If you don't monitor your efforts, you'll never know where you went wrong or what you did right. This is why some affiliate marketers do the A/B test to find out if campaign A or campaign B has the best results. In this tutorial, we will examine the different metrics and what they mean to you as an affiliate marketer.
Actionable Metrics:
As a new affiliate marketer, you need to understand that measuring your baseline metrics won't show you the real picture. The numbers are impressive, but why did the person come to your website? This is the real question. You need to figure out and understand what made this person visit your site. What did you do that encouraged the person to respond?
How To Estimate Your Performance:
Cost Per Lead: In this metric, you are measuring each lead that was generated during your campaign. This is simple to calculate and will require you to divide the average monthly expenses for the campaign by the number of sales your campaign generated. It is easy now to compare these numbers with previous months or previous campaigns.
Incremental Revenue: This is an excellent way to measure the revenue your affiliate programs are doing. If you were making $500 a month running your other affiliate campaigns before you introduced your new campaign, you can now calculate what you made this month and subtract the previous month earnings. This will tell you how much revenue your new campaign has added to your monthly earnings.
Click Through Rate: The click-through rate will measure the number of clicks a website visitor makes on an ad or a link. This will help you determine the types of links or ads a website visitor will click on the most. Afterward, you can change your ads to increase your click-through rate.
Conversion Rate: This is very important to keep track of. It tells you how many people who visited your site either bought the product or left their email address. If you can get 3 people out of 100, your ad campaign is doing well and you should stick with this. If you can't convert any people from your ad campaign, it is time to take a closer look at what you are doing and revise your strategy.
Return on Investment: This is one of the most important metrics for your ad campaign. This will show you if your investment has reaped any profits for you. If you've invested over $500 in your ad campaign and haven't seen any return on this investment, it is time to look at your campaign and change it quickly.
Reversed Sales Rate: As an affiliate marketer this is very important to monitor and keep a close on. If too many people are returning the product you are promoting, this has got to tell you something. It means that this product is a high-risk product and you should stop promoting it now. It is time to cancel this campaign and look for a new one. Remember your reputation is on the line and you don't want to promote products that a person isn't satisfied with and wants to return immediately.
Vanity Metrics: When we talk about vanity metrics we are talking about the number of downloads, how many people follow you, how many people have registered, and the number of tweets per day. We are looking at the user retention, their engagement, the repeated use, and the revenue.
Impressions & Total Visits: This metric can be an ego grabber if you decide to measure it. It might boost your ego to see that your website received 3000 visitors in a given month. However, this doesn't tell us anything. It is not helping us improve our ad campaign. We need to figure out why a person visited the site and walked away. That is what is important and not how many visits we had.
Bounce Rate: As we all now bounce rate deals with a person visiting your website and leaving without visiting any of your other pages. Just because you have a high bounce rate doesn't mean that your campaign isn't performing well. Normally, you'll always have a high bounce rate from mobile users. Normal bounce rates are between 10 and 90%, depending on the type of website you have.
Conclusion:
In order to make sure that you've adopted the best affiliate program, you need to measure your metrics for efficiency. If you understand what metrics need to be measured, you'll become a successful affiliate marketer. Don't worry about the little things that don't matter. Worry about the overall picture and keep on top of the metrics. Stay away from vanity metrics because they can discourage you and mislead you. Word of advice to all new affiliate marketers – stop investing all your time and energy into misleading indexes and metrics that don't matter. Focus on the metrics that really count and matter instead.