Learner Online Earner

The Master Teaches the Student the skills to pay his bills

I have wrote 100′s of blog posts in the past few years on various blogs, and all of them provide a lot of information, however todays blog is a little different – especially for this site.. Today I am going to be talking about how you should be spying on every visitor and what information you need to enable to make more money, and it will not cost you a penny!

Google analytics is a completely free package provided by Google, and it is always very usefuly to use it to obtain the data and analyse the data – however it has its limitations for an affiliate website….

However before I go into Google Analytics weakness’s from an affiliate perspective, let me give you the basic figures you are going to want to be looking at daily….

1. Traffic Figures: This is the big one, this is the number of unique visitors you have a day – this is one of the key metrics you should be monitoring and logging every single day. your overall goal is to increase this as high as is possible!

2. Bounce Rate: This is the number of people who left your site viewing only one page – it is always viewed as a percentage and it is usually the case of the lower the count the better.

3. Traffic Source: This is another key area, and it allows you to break down the data into the differing traffic sources, could be you are earning referrals from the linking you have done, search engine traffic (Both Paid and organic) as well as direct visitors or your email marketing! If you do not follow this information then how do you know what area of your marketing is working for you?

4. Goal Tracking: In the world of e-commerce or lead generation, you have obvious goals and can track these quite easily. A goal will typically have a value to a company and with added features such as e-commerce tracking you can get an exact idea of what a user is worth on average to you.

However despite these strengths for analytics, in our environment of affiliate marketing it is usually quite different and Analytics has distinct limitations..

1. Traffic Figures: This is one area where you need to realise it is the quality and not quantity, and also do you have an offer to match the incoming traffic. For example there is no point in offering someone Nail gun if they have come in under a Nail polish keyword, they obviously do not want to do some DIY, but instead paint there Nails. If you do not have a Nail Polish Affiliate – this visitor will have a bad impression of your website.
2. Bounce rates: High bounce rates are dreadful for your website arent they? In 90% of sites yes, however what you need to realise on an affilate website, if someone lands on the correct page for the Pink Nail Polish, and you have an affiliate offer to send them to buy the Pink Nail Polish, they will click on that link and leave your site – meaning according to the statistics they will have “bounced” away from your site – but only due to the fact they have converted exactly how you want them to!
3. Traffic Source: This is your key source of information, especially if you pay for traffic as you need to keep every single penny accounted for to ensure you end up making a profit rather than a loss!
4. You may have spotted the distinct issue for an affiliate with goal tracking, Google analytics requires javascript to be loaded on a page, now if the page is an external site to yours (As per the fact they are merchants), means there is no ability to place the javascript, and our conversions are not tracked – we will cover how to resolve these issues in a later blog.

If you have any questions on how to analyse the date – please leave a comment below or sign up to our newsletter and ask any questions you may have and I wil happily answer them