The Importance of Knowing Your Numbers

As an affiliate marketer, you’ll want to become intimately familiar with numbers of all kinds. These numbers will tell you a great deal! They’ll tell you how successful your campaigns are, what you need to do to improve their success, and what is hindering your success or just plain not working. It’s important to pay as much attention as possible to these numbers since your goal is to make more money as an affiliate marketer.

You’ll find these telling numbers in a variety of places. Your basic web stats can be found in your cPanel and in the backend of the affiliate network you are promoting. Find Awstats in your cPanel. This will tell you what search terms you are being found for in the search engines. You’ll also be able to see how many visitors you are getting per day and per month. It will also tell you how often the search engines are visiting your site — a telling sign that can affect rankings.

If you want more detailed stats, you’ll do well to join a service like Google Analytics. This is completely free, and will give you access to many numbers that tell you how well your site is doing in the search engines. It will also clue you in to various aspects of your visitors’ behavior. All of this data can help you build up your website and focus on what is working for you.

In addition to knowing information about your visitors, you’ll want to pay careful attention to your conversion data as well. This number tells you how many people take the desired action (usually, making a purchase) versus how many people land on your website. You can find some generally detailed information in the backend of your affiliate network, in most cases. The biggest affiliate networks like Clickbank, Amazon, eBay, and others give you many numbers to work with in regards to improving your campaigns.

As was mentioned earlier, you can add tracking tags to your affiliate links to drill down into what pages and types of promotions are making the most sales. Use this information to ramp up your efforts in certain areas, and lessen your efforts in others areas.

The reason for doing all of this is simple — if you don’t pay attention to the numbers, then you’ll never know how well you are really doing! It’s not enough to just slap some affiliate links up on a website, you need to track them to know how well your efforts are going. You need to know your traffic numbers as well. All of this information put together will help to make you a better marketer all around.
image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/35150987@N08/3360896326/ 

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