Is My Affiliate Program Performing Well? How To Tell

You have your affiliate program up and ready to go, your affiliates are working hard, and things are going great—or are they?

How can you know for sure that your affiliate program is really performing at its best? How do you determine whether or not you need to change your onboarding strategy or seek new affiliates?

In this post, we’ll help you figure out if your affiliate program is really as successful as you think by cluing you in on a few key things to look for and offering up a handful of tips on how to improve.

Managing your affiliate program is easy with Easy Affiliate. Try it out for yourself today!

Why Is Tracking Affiliate Program Performance Important?

Measuring performance is a vital part of your success as a business owner. Setting goals in your business is a great way to track your progress and highlight key places where your small business can grow and develop. 

After all, the last thing you want to do is waste valuable time, energy, and money on campaigns and other marketing efforts without any sort of strategic goal or benchmark to reference.

Accurate, Updated Website

Is your website accurate and up-to-date? There’s nothing worse than an affiliate program website that features outdated information. If visitors go to your website and notice that your information hasn’t been updated in a long time, or your site seems neglected in any way, potential affiliates will be turned off and not want to work with you.

Read More: How to Choose the Right Keywords for Optimizing Your Website’s Content

Affiliate Program Quality

An affiliate program is only as good as the entities supporting it. This is not to say that you’ve got to have a program full of top-tier affiliates, but are those affiliates you do have in your program performing to the best of their ability? 

Be sure to pay attention to your affiliates and monitor their behaviors. Do you notice a number of inactive affiliates? How much traffic is each affiliate generating? These are important questions to ask and analyze on a regular basis. 

Read More: 3 Ways That Micro-Influencers Can Benefit You

Promotion Performance

To achieve success, affiliate programs require time to plan, schedule, and implement promotions together with affiliates. By tracking click-throughs to your website and measuring online sales, you’ll be able to determine how well your promotions are working.

You’ll also begin to understand what percentage of each promotion’s progress can be attributed to your affiliates. This information will give you important insight into the value each affiliate is bringing to the table. 

Read More: 10 Ways to Prepare Affiliates for Online Promotions

Affiliate Communication

Another excellent way to ensure your affiliate program is performing at its best is to pay special attention to how you’re communicating with the individuals in your program. How often do you reach out to your affiliates? Do you offer personalized communication? How is your support team performing? Do you give your affiliates an adequate amount of information to properly promote your online business?

Read More: 4 Strategies for Keeping Your Affiliates Happy

Continuing Education

There’s nothing more powerful than a company whose culture is based on a desire to constantly try and learn new things. Combine that with affiliate partners who seek to do the same, and you have a recipe for success. 

How often are your company and its affiliates taking time to learn about the latest news and trends in the field? Are you helping your affiliates continue to grow in their knowledge of your business and industry? Addressing these areas of education will go a long way toward strengthening your business over time.

Read More: Why Industry Knowledge Is Vital for Affiliate Programs

KPIs to Keep In Your Back Pocket

KPIs, or Key performance indicators, are measures of performance that can help you evaluate the success of a specific campaign or your business as a whole. Carefully tracking KPIs allows you to determine how healthy your company is and how your efforts are helping or hurting its progress.

Here are a few KPIs to keep in mind as you grow your affiliate program:

• Click-Through Rate (CTR). Your CTR is the number of clicks on links or ads generated by affiliates on your website. This KPI helps you see which affiliates are actively working and how effective they actually are.
• Conversion Rate. The conversion rate refers to the sales your business is achieving from affiliate-generated traffic. This metric helps you track the success of your promotions.
• Cost Per Click/Lead. The cost per click is the average amount of money you spend each time your affiliate generates click-throughs to your site or each time affiliate traffic generates a lead.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). This KPI helps you understand how valuable your long-term customer relationships are and how effective your affiliates are at generating these types of relationships. 
• Churn Rate. Your business’ churn rate measures the number of customers who visit your online business’ website but don’t wind up becoming repeat customers or who cancel services or memberships. An easy way to calculate churn rate is by using this formula: Customers Lost in a Given Period / Original Number of Customers at the Start of the Period = Customer Churn Rate.

The Takeaway

Your affiliate program depends on the success of your affiliates. That is, for your business to do well, your affiliates need to do well. Two of the best ways you can help them succeed is by paying attention to key performance indicators and doing your part to make sure that they have what they need to be successful at their part.

Tracking your affiliates’ performance, keeping up your end of the bargain by staying in contact with them, offering plenty of resources, and giving your affiliates a great product to promote are all simple but powerful ways you can keep your business moving forward.

Create your own affiliate marketing program quickly and easily with Easy Affiliate – get started today!

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