Affiliate Challenge: How To Get Your Article Stats Part 2

This is the practical part of the post where im going to pull all kinds of numbers from my articles, clickbank, and also some sub-domains to find out how they are all performing up until this point. I’ll then use this as a guide as to what I need to change and improve upon to hopefully increase my final goal, which is more sales.

Lets get right down to business and find out how the first article that made a sale for me is performing. This product is listed in Clickbank, and I’ve used this article to promote it using a direct link via a PHP redirect from Articlesbase.

So the first step will be to head on over to Articlesbase and click on my articles statistics page to get a look at what views this article has taken so far.

Here is the stats for that article ..

The important parts to get from the stats above are the total article views, which in my case is 290. The next part you want to make a note of to move on to the next step is the date of the article submission. The article above was first submitted on 10/22/2009(US Date Format).

So to recap… Note down your total article views, and also the date of submission.

• 290 Article Views
• 10/22/2009 Date Of Submission

Now I have this info I can then move on to the next step, which means we have to visit Clickbank.com and log into our affiliate account.

Once inside your CB(Clickbank) account you need to enter the analytics section. To do this click on “Reporting” in the navigation bar at the top of the site, then click on “Analytics” in the sub menu. You should now be on a page full of stats and other fun charts to browse through. But what we want to focus on in this step is this part…

What you want to do on this analytics  page is make sure the “View As” option is set to “Affiliate” as above. If not then just hit the small circle right next to the affiliate option. You should now see some different stats displayed.

Once we have our affiliate stats displayed, we now need to change the default date. What we want to do here is change the date that is currently displaying our affiliate stats, to only display our stats from the exact day we submitted our article that we noted down from the article page in the first step.

So in my case I want CB to show me my affiliate stats from 10/22/2009, to this present day. Here is how to do it.

Look for the “Date Range” part as above. Click on the drop down arrow and select “Custom range”. Once you select custom range your analytics page should update and display your custom date input, it’s here that you need to enter the date your article went live.

As you can see I entered 10/22/2009 as my start date, and then selected today’s date which just happened to be 12/08/2009 at the time of writing this post. Once you hit GO your analytics stats will again update showing you all the clicks to your affiliate products from your start date, all the way down to the current day.

For this next part to work, it’s critical to use a tracking ID with your Clickbank hoplinks whenever you write a new article. I cover this in detail in my clickbank tracking post if you want to find out how to do this.

If you are using tracking ID’s in your hoplinks, we are going to make use of them in this next step.

What we are going to do now is narrow down all the analytics data by selecting tracking ids from the CB menu on the left side of the page, you should see something like this.

You will notice many different options on the left of this page like Hops, Order Form Impressions, Sales and so on, you have the option to select Tracking ID’s in each one of these options to narrow down your stats, but as I know this article already made a sale I decided to narrow my tracking id’s by clicking the sales option.

If you are yet to make a sale, using the Hops option and the tracking id within that menu will do just fine. Again once you click on Tracking ID your page will again update with new information, and it’s in this information that we need to look for the tracking id we used for that particular article.

In a nutshell what you see above is my articles tracking id and how many clicks it has attracted, which I narrowed down by using the custom date range. So since this article was published it has taken 41 clicks on the link contained within that article.

Now what we need to do is remember our total article views from the first step, which will let you see how many times your article has been viewed by people. In my case this article was viewed 290 times already.

I have two numbers to work with now that will tell me what percentage of people that read my article, actually click through to the products page via my affiliate link. The two numbers are…

• 41
• 290

To find out the percentage all you have to do is simply divide 41 by 290 then multiply by 100.

41/290 = 0.14 *100 = 14%

So this article has a 14% click through rate, which I believe is not too bad, but I think a good avg CTR(click through rate) would probably be about 30%.

However this article did make a sale, so while im at this point I’ll also figure out what the actual sales conversion rate is for this product. To do this I’ll use the 41 hoplink clicks because its this number that is showing me the actual visits to the products sales page. As I’ve only made 1 sale so far from this article the sum will look like this….

1/41 = 0.024 *100 = 2.4%

A 2.4% conversion rate for this product, which again I believe is a pretty standard percentage for downloadable products.

Now im aware that my article has a 14% CTR, and this product coverts at 2.4%. But again I want to go one further and work out what percentage of people that view my article actually buy this product.

1/290 * 100 = .34%

.34%, obviously I need to work on improving this in the future, but at least I know what numbers im dealing with, so I now have a target to compare any improvements up against.

14% People Click The Article Affiliate Link.

2.4% People That Clicked The Article Link Buy The Product.

.34% People Visit The Article, Then Go On To Buy It.

That’s my benchmark above. Can I beat it when I use sub domain mini sites rather than direct links? Find out in PART 3.

Ok I lied! Because this post is so long and I really want to go into detail, I’ll be extending this into a 3rd part. Next post will show you how I get my stats and conversions from my sub domains.

Tags: analytics, clickbank, tracking ids

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 5:11 pm and is filed under affiliate challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.