It amazing how many affiliate fly blind as far as analytics go. Sure they may have Google conversion tracking setup, but a lot of affiliate don’t fully understand what a key metric such as Cost/Conv. even means. Really!
The days of checking your sales once a week and making sure you made more than you spend just doesn’t cut it in the cut throat competitive world of Adwords these days. You need to know what your conversion rates are down to the keywords and the ad. You need to know what your ROI is everyday and how it’s changing over the course of weeks and months so you can make adjustments as necessary.
I would even suggest studying what your bounce rates are, that is how many people are coming to your site and hitting the back button right away? This is now factored into your landing page quality score.
As far as I’m concerned the absolutely best (and free) analytics tool is Google Analytics. There’s a bit of a learning curve to use this puppy, but once you understand how to use Analytics, it will blow your mind what you can discover about your site & traffic.
I’ll give you a quick story…
Last November I had gone into a new market and was off to a decent start, making a small profit, however, my conversion rate was horrible, less than 1%. When i talked to my affiliate manager about it he said my conversion rate should be about 2-3%. My landing page was good, I was bidding on the right keywords, I just didn’t know what the problem was!
I spend an hour on Google Analytics to see if I could dig up anything of value. When I looked at what countries I was getting traffic from (in the month of December) to my surprise I was getting more clicks from India than any other country!
I thought to myself, this can’t be right! Let’s see how many sales I’m getting from India. I checked my clickbank stats and I had ONE sales from India in the entire month.
CRAP!
The merchant had told me that this product sells great worldwide so turn on all the countries on Google Adwords….BIG MISTAKE!
Upon analyzing my stats I discovered that I was getting 80% of my sales from 20% of my traffic, that is, traffic from US, Canada, UK, & Australia. I shut off all the other countries that were sending me non-converting traffic and the next day my ROI was 1000%.
WOW!
So I increased my bids by 3X to 4X and my sales went from 20-30/day to over 200/day! 
do you use any other software to supplement google analytics..for tracking purposes
Hi Amit,
When you say you increased your bids 3x to 4x times, do you mean that on your current keyword list you were using you went from .30 cents per click (as an example) to .90 to 1.20 per bid?
Did that dramatically increase your traffic? Did you have to add a bunch more keywords to get to the 200 sales per day level?
Thanks for the clarification.
Amit,
Was the campaign targeting both content and search? Did you perform the same changes on both (if they were seperate campaigns)?
Peter
Hi Amit,
Analytics it is, I check my analytics also, but will devote more time in really studying it.
Vijay
Hi Amit. Great site you have hear. Very insightful.
My experience has been in e-commerce retail but I’m new in affiliate marketing. When setting up my PPC campaigns for ecommerce, I place Overture/Google/MSN code at the checkout to track conversions.
How do I track keyword conversions with affiliate marketing? The sale would take place on the advertiser’s/merchant website so I’m a bit confused as to how to track keyword performance (since I can’t place code on THEIR website checkout).
Again, I’m very new to this so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again for putting together such an inspirational site.
Hello Amit,
Your very impressive at the art of being an affiliate. I know this is a little off the topic hear but I wish I can start a new thread.
Just want your advice. I really would like to be an affiliate but from what I have researched, the money is bigger and easier to be made if I create my own product. I just don’t know what I would create. Since you are a super affiliate, I would really like to know your thoughts. I understand that you worked at MIT, which leads me to believe that if you don’t have the computer background that you do, and a great one at that, I may never be able to rich “Super Affiliate”. Please give me your advice. Thanks in advance.