Addicted To Checking Your Affiliate Stats? Read This.

Are you one of those people that spends far too much time checking to see how many sales you’ve made? Since the last time you checked five minutes ago? Me too, if truth be told, although I’m not as bad as I used to be.

For example, there was a time when I checked my Google Adsense account at least a dozen times a day to see how much I was making. Now a week can go by without me checking it. That’ll surprise a lot of people, particularly if they are still checking every hour on the hour. The cure? There wasn’t one. I just found other stats to check instead.

Affiliate marketing gives you endless opportunities to see how much you’ve made – and therefore to waste time that could be spent generating sales. There’s always an excuse to log into your network accounts – you need a link, to sign up to a new program, check for discount codes – and of course, if you’re there anyway, it never hurts to see if you’ve made any money. I did have the Affiliate Window Desktop Alert installed, but every time it went “ker-ching” I found myself scurrying over to Affiliate Window to find out what I’d sold, so I’m quite pleased it has deactivated itself of late.

This year I’ve decided to satisfy my addiction by checking stats that can actually help my business grow.

The most important stats you can check are those related to your website’s traffic. I’ve always spent a lot of time analysing how people find my sites and what it is that they are looking for when they visit them. So far this year I’ve been doing this in even greater detail than previously – and it’s amazing how it pays off.

For example, the recent cold weather saw sales of shoe grippers soar (you attach them to boots or shoes to stop you slipping on snow or ice).

Looking through my stats for one of my websites that features them, I was pleased to see hundreds of visitors finding their way to my site to buy them. My pleasure was short lived however – because I wasn’t actually selling any grippers. The reason? I was directing those visitors to I Want One Of Those and they were out of stock. I would have continued to send them there too if I hadn’t been checking my stats, but because I had I was able to redirect that traffic to Amazon – and that same day the sales started to come in. Despite them being twice the price at Amazon (different brand), I’ve sold 58 pairs since I switched that link less than a month ago. No big deal really, but 58 sales I would have missed if I had not been checking stats that really matter. And for something that took me two minutes tops to do.

And if you absolutely must get your fix by logging into your affiliate marketing accounts, at least take some time to look at the stats that matter there too. The networks provide an amazing amount of information that you can put to good advantage and one area that I have started focusing on is merchant conversion rates.

I’m the first to admit that I’m not driving anywhere near enough affiliate related traffic to make sweeping judgements about the general performance of merchants, but months of the stats that I do have to hand tell me one thing. Some merchants convert far better than others. For me at least. Even in the same vertical, there are merchants outperforming others by a factor of three, four and even five. Which means for every 100 visitors I send to an underperforming merchant, I could make three, four or five more sales by sending those same visitors to a different merchant selling much the same thing (often exactly the same thing).

Today I received a “Dear John” email from a merchant, basically saying that if I didn’t generate at least one sale for their “great program” (their words, not mine) by the end of February, I would be removed.

Like all the other “Dear John” emails that I receive, this cull of affiliates is supposedly so that more time can be spent developing relationships with those affiliates who do generate at least a sale. As if copying me and others who don’t make a sale into a monthly affiliate email makes that much difference. It’s as clear as day that the prime motivation behind such emails is to generate sales, not to improve the program, and I’d rather merchants and their agencies said so rather than insult my intelligence. Short sighted nonsense like this just shouts that they don’t know the first thing about building relationships.

Will I be losing sleep if I don’t generate that sale? Not one wink. In fact the merchant in question is one of my worst performing by quite a margin. Similar merchants on the same network convert much better. Why? Who knows. I did make a purchase from the merchant myself last year – only to find it didn’t track. I reported it to the network, was told it would be looked into, and have heard nothing since – two months on. So I’m hardly going to be busting a gut to generate a sale so that I can stay on their program anyway.

I want to finish this post on a positive note so want to quickly mention two merchants that converted really well for me in the run up to Christmas. If you’re not promoting either at the moment, give them a go.

The first is Buyagift (on Affiliate Window). Not only do they give every affiliate the tools required to do their job – great products, easy to use website, discount codes for all not a select few, amazing incentives to reward success, first class support – but they also convert really well. I never worry that I’m losing sales through leakage and am proud to promote them.

The second is La Senza (on Buy.at). In the run up to Christmas, La Senza had some fantastic promotions and discount codes that all affiliates could promote, communication was fantastic, their website is very easy for customers to use and it converts really well.

There are certain verticals that I’m determined to become a player in and where I hope to make my mark on affiliate marketing. I’m probably not even on the radar screen in terms of the sales I generated for either La Senza or Buyagift this Christmas, but it’s this type of merchant that I will continue to champion and hopefully prosper alongside in the years to come.

Post over. You can get back to your stats now.