Use Analytics Data to Improve Affiliate Sales

Affiliate marketing is a growing competitive space. But with the increase in activity and how it can be measured, knowledge of analytics and data analysis is an area successful affiliates need to take advantage of to maintain a competitive edge.

Analytics can help determine what banners, text links, and other creative resources convert best and generate the highest income potential. It can also show where the most successful traffic comes from, while also allowing the ability to test changes to ads and different landing pages.


Affiliate Marketing Analytics for Increased Conversion

By studying your data, you can now learn what type of traffic converts with what particular ads and copy. You can test by geography, demographics and messaging. But to be this proactive, you need to go beyond the platform statistics and make use of your affiliate marketing analytics. Most affiliates track their efforts exclusively through the platforms that provide their banners and text links, losing the more profound insights gained by using site analytics.

Using this information allows you to double check the affiliate network’s accuracy. You can track each click from your site to the affiliate offers and make sure the platform is following all your traffic correctly.

Beyond using Google Analytics, there are platforms such as Cyfe that collect an overview of all of your websites’ page views, sessions, and users, then analyze the data to identify more significant trends in conversions, traffic sources, bounce rate and location of users. It can also track traffic from search engines and social networks to know what pages referred them, and where they exited your site.

If you are going to spend time and money on traffic development, then practicing good strategies for data analysis is an absolute necessity. Whether you are using email, videos, webinars, organic or paid search traffic, the only way to adequately measure success and the best-converting methods is through analytics. Using data analytics, you can monitor customer activities and tie them to specific sales efforts. You can cut unsuccessful efforts and increase efforts that are profitable.

Email is a great way to reach a large number of prospects at once. Many of your recipients won’t buy based on just one email, but a few may at least call for more information. By using email analytics, you can determine which subject lines get the most opens and which types of messages are more likely to generate phone calls that lead to success. You can also use analytics to determine the best time and day to send emails to your list of potential customers and put that information to use in the future.


Understanding Google Analytics

The Google Analytics interface has grown more complicated over time, but the data is also more expansive. Below is a quick rundown on the major areas inside Google Analytics and what each category holds in the way of information.

The navigation shows the major areas to grab information. Each has numerous drill down options when clicked.

By looking through the numerous options, insights into the source and activity of a site’s traffic can be gained and used to improve conversion. The sheer volume of ways to drill down into a site’s traffic data can be overwhelming but it is worth going through each element to know what they are. You want to consider how each piece of unique information can be used to improve calls to action and to direct visitors to affiliate offers. The Audience options are listed below, and many have deeper options that can be viewed.

Working through the various information types within Google Analytics also allows one to then use Google Tag Manager to further manipulate a website’s traffic, as well as understanding the sources of that traffic. This is a good read for how to implement UTM tags.

Also on the Dashboard, you can find how many users are on your site.

And if set up you can have a solid overview of your activity and numbers including insights such as:

The above numbers show the busiest times of day, where visitors are coming from, and what device they are using. With this information, you can start to get a clearer picture of your visitors. An even deeper dive into conversion and time of day and source of traffic can also help guide your affiliate ad choice.

Geolocation is one factor that can be manipulated once the data has been examined and what pages lead to conversions by country, state or city. If certain content or products attract buyers, or in the case of affiliates clickers, from specific places, you can target them and create specific messaging to increase success. Use a Geo IP recognition program - Wordpress has plugins that will allow you to send location-specific traffic to certain pages and even block countries from accessing pages.

This can all be determined based on the data in analytics. The options, while not quite endless, are numerous but if used effectively can provide methods to improve the user experience, as well as the profitability of affiliate marketing efforts.

In the above, information about site speed can instruct when to optimize what pages.

The company offers an educational series of videos to train on understanding Google Analytics at the Google Analytics Academy and you can then take an online test to become certified.

The course and the certification are great tools to have in your arsenal.

Everyone’s needs and data are different. Inside your analytics account, you can look at all the data through many filters. If you want to succeed at affiliate marketing then a solid knowledge of analytics must be part of your skill set.


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