3 Affiliate Program Metrics You Should be Tracking Right Now

Your affiliates’ performance (whether good or poor) is directly related to your program’s success. However, in order to understand how effective your program is you need to track how well your affiliates are doing.

By tracking certain metrics, you get a better understanding of your program’s strengths and weaknesses. It helps you understand how your potential customers interact with your current marketing campaigns, and it also enables you to track how your affiliates are performing. With this information, you can identify areas where you can improve your program to make it more effective and lucrative.

In this post, we’ll introduce three of the most important affiliate metrics you should keep track of. We’ll then teach you to use powerful affiliate marketing tools including Easy Affiliate, Pretty Links, and Google Analytics. Finally, we'll show you how to use this information to optimize your program. Let’s get started!

3 Affiliate Program Metrics to Track and Optimize

To get the best results from your analytics you need to track the right metrics. These will tell you the most about how your program is doing, and provide you with the most useful information. Let’s dive in!

1. Affiliate Link Click-Throughs

This metric tracks how many times each link has been clicked. This is important, as it tells you which of your links are performing well and which aren't. You can then use this information to reconsider your link placements and how you can improve their usage.

2. Visitor Conversions

Visitor conversions is a metric that tracks how often your website’s visitors convert (for example, make a purchase, or sign up for a newsletter). Conversions help you to understand your visitors’ behaviors. With this information, you can more effectively target your audience and improve sales.

While Easy Affiliate provides this metric, you can also pair up with the Pretty Links tool for a more extensive look. Let's look at how this is done. First, create your pretty link. You can do this yourself, or give your affiliates access to your Pretty Links plugin on the back end of your WordPress website. This way your affiliates can create pretty affiliate links, which ensures they get commission for their sales.

Next, you can also set up conversion reports within the Pretty Links dashboard. The results will then help you to better understand how your links are converting, and enable you to make changes to improve your visitor conversion rates.

3. Link and Advertisement Impressions

While tracking your clicks and conversions provides substantial information, keeping up with your impressions can be just as important. While click-throughs only tell you the number of clicks, impressions give you the percentage of users who see your link actually end up clicking them. If this percentage is low, you may need to reconsider your advert strategy.

Tracking impressions can be complicated, unless you use the right tools. We recommend Google Analytics, which you can easily use alongside Easy Affiliate. You’ll first need to set up an Analytics account, and add your website as a property:

Next, you can create a Tracking Event. When a user interacts with your links or advertisements in a subtle way, such as mousing over it or scrolling past it on the page, an event will be tracked. You can then use this to get an understanding of how many impressions your links and ads make.

How to Use Metrics to Optimize Your Affiliate Program’s Success

Even more important than tracking the above metrics is to put the information they give to good use. You do this by turning the results into actionable steps. For example, the number of link clicks can help you to better understand where you should place your links, while conversions give you an idea of how your audience interacts with your links. Similarly, analyzing your impressions can help you move your links and ads to more prominent locations.

To further optimize your affiliate program’s success, you should also get your affiliates in on the action. For example:

• Share the metrics with your affiliates on the Affiliate Dashboard. This can compel them to improve, and it may even promote some friendly competition.
• Create affiliate incentives to improve poorly performing metrics. For example, if conversions are low, you can offer a monetary bonus to the affiliate with the highest conversion rate for the month.

By bringing your affiliates into the fold, you can improve your optimization efforts. This will have positive effects on their performance and your program's continued success.

Conclusion

When you understand how each of your affiliates is performing, you have a better idea of your program’s standing. Without such information, you may fail to work on your weaknesses, which can ultimately lead to your program’s failure. Fortunately, affiliate program metrics give you an inside look at your performance.

In this post, we’ve introduced three important affiliate metrics to track (with the help of such tools as Easy Affiliate and Pretty Links), which can help you optimize your program. To quickly recap, these include:

1. Affiliate link click-throughs.
2. Visitor conversions.
3. Link and advertisement impressions.

Do you have any questions about affiliate program metrics, or how Easy Affiliate can help? Let us know in the comments section below!

If you liked this post, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn! And don't forget to subscribe in the box below.

Affiliate Link Disclosure