Jul
10
Data Analysis is key to your Profitable Growth
Filed Under (Analysing Data) by nathan on 10-07-2010
In a recent article I pointed out how vital analytics are, and today I am going to go into them in a bit more detail, as well as giving you an insight into just how useful this data can be using an example site of mine, Click Discount.
Click Discount is a website I started in 2007, with the aim of learning my affiliate trade and seeing just what I could do. The futher I got into afiliate marketing the further I realised the potential however did not have the time to push this site as far as I wanted until very recently.
Upon the version 1 development in April 2007, I worked on a lot of areas which where not common place at the time however they are now…
- Affiliate Link Masking
- Affiliate Image source Masking
- User Tracking around the site
Now this article is not about 1 or 2, it is purely about 3.Yes back in 2007 I understood the value of gathering every single piece of data available to me, I was gathering user agents, IP address’s etc, and working out trends based upon this data and using it to push the site forward to a point it earned a reasonable amount per month – until life issues took place.
Briefly in 2008 and 2009 I looked at the full revamp of the website, however due to the plans being over ambitious on the revamp basis this never happened, and the site has continued to trickle me a small income month on month to proove its worth.
Now 3 years on fom the original site, a new site is well underway in development and the key focus this time has not been to add swishy new features on the front end – but to build upon the strong background in data aquisition and testing of pages.
One of the key features of the new system still in development, is it allows us to see which link on a page is actually clicked, as well as operate a policy in split testing page designs based upon a per user basis automatically, on a per affiliate basis.
This deep level of control allows us to analyse what is best and adjust every element of the page for the specific affiliate – performing a split test virtually without manual intervention and providing me back the data to analyse.
However this control is great for click through rates, and whilst improving these, as an affiliate there is only one thing we are truly interested in – and that is the sale on the merchants site.
With certain affiliate networks, they provide a data feed or further ways of providing detailed data analysis, this information is often most overlooked by new affiliates – as was done on Click-Discount V1. However this little snippet of extra tracking allows you to trace your best traffic – those that converted into a sale.
In an ideal world, you want to track the people that purchased from your merchants, all the way back to the search engine and what they typed in to find your website, through to the page they landed on, and there path through to the merchant.
With this data you can then not only improve this process for each visitor to that specific merchant, but improve your search engine keyword targetting to provide traffic that converts into sales.
