Most important stats

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JeremyTang

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Nov 21, 2006
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I'm just starting to get into the world of affiliate marketing. What stats do you guys find the most useful to track?

I have a few campaigns that I'm going to start with as text links on niche sites (adbrite) and then later try my hand at google adwords or overture.

The stats I'm tracking/analysing are:
  • Total Number of clicks vs Number of Sales (conversion ratio)
  • Clicks per unique ip (or unique clicks)
  • Average Daily Cost, average daily clicks (average cost per click)
  • Click through ratio
I reckon the most important number is the conversion ratio, because with that you can calculate what is your maximum CPC before you start losing money. Any body track additional stats?

Jeremy
 


I track everything and I keep everything for quiet a long time, call it overkill but if I do 6 or 7 campaigns one month and two month's later want to do a similar campaign then I can refer back to see which ads performed better, which landing pages did better, what did I do wrong, what could I improved upon, which keywords to avoid.

All these things can tie into future products, so I go overkill and track everything, how much should you track is up to you but the more testing/information you gather the better off you'll be.
 
All the stats you mentioned are useful and worth tracking.

A note on ROI...

ROI is only important when you are cash/credit constrained. ROI ignores total profit so it will tell you to keep a campaign where you spend $1.00 a day but profit $10.00 (1000% ROI) but tell you to possibly kill the campaign where you spend $1,000 a day but only profit $500 (50% ROI).

Rationally, would you rather earn $10 or $500?

For me the ultimate statistic is Absolute Profit. Admittedly, I have resources that some may not, and I will consider ROI everything else being equal, but a lot of people want to talk about their ROI. You cannot spend ROI.

The next most important metric to me is Conversion Rate, if you have 2 pages and one converts at 5% and the other at 10% you can pay twice as much to generate traffic. Constant testing can and will get you these kinds of improvements. Conversion rate is almost always the answer to the question - "How the heck can they afford to pay that much per click?"

Lastly, I pay attention to profit per thousand impressions. Especially in search, I am constrained by the total number of impressions I have access to. So I want to pay attention to my maximum profit from that finite set of impressions. It is not at all uncommon to prefer the lower conversion rate that gets more clicks. This comes back to maximum profit.

If I get 10,000 impressions a day - would I rather profit $100 or $50? Conversion rate, click through rate and CPC all end up being factored in this comparison.
 
Thanks for the comments... as I'm coding simple scripts to track this stuff - I'm thinking there's gotta be scripts out there already that do this. Anyone use any scripts in particular?
 
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