It’s pretty easy for anyone with a laptop and an internet connection to get into affiliate marketing. Succeeding in that endeavor, however, is a whole other story. Whether you’ve just started your affiliate marketing journey or you’re a seasoned influencer, tracking your progress is crucial to ensure success.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the key performance indicators you need to track if you want to monitor your affiliate marketing success.
The Main Metrics Used To Monitor Affiliate Marketing Success
In your research, you’ll come across dozens of different KPIs that are used to measure success in this industry. However, for the most efficient monitoring, you’ll want to take a minimalistic approach. According to experts, the following are the most important metrics to monitor.
Click-Through-Rate
Any affiliate marketing for beginners course will introduce you to the concept of a click-through-rate, also known as CTR. In simple terms, this denotes the percentage of people who actually click on your affiliate link after consuming your content. For example, the percentage of YouTube viewers on your channel that click on the link in the description box.
This metric is important because it illustrates how effectively you are able to generate interest in your audience. Even if they don’t make a purchase, this indicates that you have some sort of influence on them. You’ve piqued their interest.
Conversion Rate
Arguably a more important metric, your conversion rate indicates the proportion of your audience that responds to your call-to-action. That is, they ultimately do what you’re trying to persuade them to do. This typically means the percentage of people who have bought products using your affiliate links.
If your affiliate offers are valued by your audience and you are providing a solution to their problems, you would have a higher conversion rate. To increase this metric, consider targeting your audience better, and giving them more incentives to purchase through your links.
Return On Investments (Ad Spend)
The main purpose of joining an affiliate marketing program is to earn money. The time, energy and possible financial investments you put into persuading consumers to buy your products are part of your ad spend.
This metric will help you estimate how effective your marketing efforts are. Use it to help fine tune your marketing strategy. For example, if you are spending money on creating written content but find that you are getting more ROI from YouTube content creation, this metric will help you make that distinction.
Revenue Per Click and Average Order Value
Not all affiliate programs are equal, neither are all the clicks you will get. These two metrics (RPC and AOV) will allow you to examine how profitable your affiliate marketing offers have the potential to be.
RPC combines your CTR and CR to show how much earnings each visitor is giving you (on average). AOV, on the other hand, shows the average size of each order that corresponds to a click. That is, the average earnings you can expect per sale. Targeting high end customers and offering package deals helps increase AOV, while RPC can be increased by analyzing which products and affiliate programs are more profitable.
Automated Monitoring To Measure Affiliate Marketing Success
At this point, you might feel overwhelmed by the wealth of data that you need to analyze and turn into useful information. Instead of relying on your inexperience, it’s a lot better to use tracking tools to measure your affiliate marketing success. Of course, keep in mind that different affiliate marketing platforms can allow you to reach your audience more effectively.
Here are a few tools you might consider using to automate your monitoring process:
- Impact.com: This is a platform that automates the entire affiliate marketing process, allowing both the affiliate and the program to track marketing metrics to measure success. The website handles the entire partnership lifecycle and streamlines tracking.
- PartnerStack: An easy to use and fully featured platform that focuses on affiliate marketing management for SaaS companies. Although there is a steep learning curve here, it’s a fully customizable interface that provides extensive analytics.
- Post Affiliate Pro: This website claims to simplify the affiliate marketing process, making it perfectly suited to beginners in the industry. Using advanced technology, this website allows you to analyze progress on multiple programs. It’ll even help you calculate earnings from all your active campaigns.
The websites mentioned above are only a few of the many options available to track and monitor your affiliate marketing campaigns. Even though they will help you with computing the data into meaningful information, it’s best to familiarize yourself with the terms used in this industry.
Final Thoughts
To achieve success in affiliate marketing, several metrics are used to monitor and track the process. These metrics are useful both to the partner (you) and the program (the website that pays you). Use the affiliate marketing metrics mentioned above to improve your efforts and get more out of your campaigns.
