Tracking and testing to the main ingredients when assessing success and failure of any affiliate marketing campaign, and I am known to say something, which goes along the lines of…
“you can’t improve what you can’t measure”
This has never been so true when it comes to affiliate marketing as you need to work out where the visitor comes from, how far along the process they got, and to see in one of two things. Either why they bought the product or why they didn’t buy the product, and you need to know why for both reasons.
When you start analysing every aspect of an affiliate site, you will then start to see what is effective and what isn’t as effective. So, for example, you may think that PPC marketing is bringing new sales. However, if you take a look at your analytics, you may be shocked to realise that the little article you created a few months ago, has now suddenly jumped up in the search rankings and is producing sales.
I had a site in the past that had the sidebar on the right-hand side, and it was earning me around £10 a day in commissions. I then decided that I would try the sidebar on the left-hand side of the site, and suddenly my earnings doubled, and so I soon worked out which side of the site the sidebar needed to be on.
If I hadn’t had tested I would still be earning £10 a day from that said site. You can get very analytical and bury yourself in stats and figures, and I’m not saying that you should do that. However, you should pay a reasonable amount of attention to what is going on with your site where the traffic is coming from and what traffic is converting into sales.
I have some tracking software that tracks all my Google, Bing and Yahoo search engine rankings, so I know exactly where my keywords are placed in the search engines. I can also see which ones are getting the most traffic. I can then see which rankings need to be improved and so on and so forth.
Below is a video on the tracking software I use…
It is very difficult for a lot of people to make money when it comes to affiliate marketing, and that is because they don’t do any tests and to be honest this is what held me back when I first started, and it was only when my mentor pointed out to me that I wasn’t looking at the figures that I started getting really obsessed with the stats. Once I’d worked out the behaviour of my visitors.
I soon realised that there were getting put off, squeeze page and so, with a few changes in a few twists a few little tricks. I managed to increase conversions, which made more money without having to drive more traffic to the site.
As shown above it is not always about getting a lot of traffic it is sometimes about how to convert the traffic you do have into more sales.
I like to use Google Analytics accompanied by SeeUrank, and I installed the rank tracker plugin for WordPress, which I found to be very handy as it lets you know what keywords you are ranking for. You will see some really random keywords that you would never have guessed you are ranking for…
If you have any questions, then, please contact me as I’m always more than happy to help.
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