Learn Affiliate Marketing - Flop Idle » tracking ids

Affiliate Challenge: How To Get Your Article Stats Part 3

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 02:55:41 +0000

Part 3 is now upon us. We have covered how to get your stats and conversions from your articles in the last two posts, so we will use this post to cover the final stage of our analysis which is to grab our stats from the articles that link to the sub-domains we have created.

The goal for my articles that link to my sub-domains are completely different from my direct linking articles. When I use a direct affiliate link in my articles, I intend for the reader to read through that article and click on the link to be taken directly to the products sales page. I’m hoping that the reader then purchases the product so I can earn a commission.

When I use a sub-domain mini-site I want the reader to again click the link in the article, but this time they will be taken to my mini-site where I want them to enter their email so I can send them a pre-written follow up email sequence hoping that they make a purchase via a link contained in one of those emails.

It’s common knowledge that building an email list is more valuable than just sending someone right to a sales page, then losing them forever. Sure you make a commission from a sale, but if you get their email you have the opportunity to make the sale many times over with related products you offer in your email sequence.

I will now show you how to track your stats and conversions if you use articles that point people to a sub-domain opt-in page. I want to find out what percentage of people that visit one of my articles, then go on to fill in the email form on my mini-site to opt in to my email list.

By the way, if you want to find out how to create sub domains, and why I do it, then visit my post all about creating sub-domains.

I have several articles pointing links to my mini-sites, and as they are not affiliate links I cannot use any tracking ids in them. However you can still see how many clicks and visitors each one of your articles brings to your site by using your cpanel on your domains. So let’s do just that, but first we need to find out how many views our articles have received so far.

Using ArticlesBase I visit the statistics page and gather up all the views from the articles that are sending people to one of my mini-sites. In total I have 5 articles that are pointing to my mini-site opt in page, the product being promoted via the follow up email is another Clickbank product.

From the 5 articles combined I have received 120 views. Now I need to work out how many of these visitors actually clicked my links, and then went on to enter their email into the form on my mini-sites.

To find out how many visits my sub-domain sites got, I need to enter my domains cpanel(control panel). You can find out how to do this again by clicking on the sub domain link above. What you are looking for once you are in your cpanel is the Awstats icon below.

Once you click and enter Awstats you will be presented with the next page which will display to you a list of your sub-domains to pick from.

All you need to do once you get to the step above is select what sub-domain you want to see the stats for, then click on the small magnifying glass(red circle) above.

The next page you will come to is full of stats all about your sub-domain. But what we want to get from this page is the amount of visitors to your sub-domain min site, and we can do that by viewing this next part which is pretty much at the top of the current page.

Because I know that only my articles are sending people to this page, I can be sure that those 56 visits above are all coming from people that have read my articles. However, if you get traffic to your sub-domains from other sources there is still a way to find out what articles are sending what traffic.

You want to look further down your Awstats page for the “Connect To Site From” section. This section should look something like this…

Not only does the information above tell you how many visits you are getting, but it also gives you the exact article that is sending the traffic to your sub domain mini site. And because we have this information we again get to see what the best performing articles are. Who needs tracking ids anyway;)

I recommend studying all the stats in Awstats. I think Awstats is underused my most site owners, which is unfortunate because it can be a goldmine of information.

So from studying the Awstats info above, I now know I have had 56 visitors from my articles to my mini site page. And as we discovered from the start of this post I have also had 120 viewers to my articles, so we can now work out the click through rate of the 120 people that click the link and are taken to my mini-site where I want them to enter their email.

Here is the sum….

56/120 = 0.46 *100 =46%

Nearly half of the viewers that read my articles want to click through to visit my mini-site! At 46% that’s awesome! But now I need to find out how many of the 46% actually go on to submit their information to join my list for that product.

I use Aweber to capture all the visitors email info, and then send those people the follow-up email sequence promoting my product. Looking at the Aweber stats I can see that so far 8 people have actually signed up by using their email on my mini site. So each one of these potential customers will be sent my email sequence as soon as they sign up to get more information from me.

Let’s work out the next sum which will find out what percentage of people that visit my mini site, actually feel the need to enter their email info to learn more about the product I am promoting. It looks something like this…

8/56 = 0.14 * 100 = 14%

So my conversion rate for email captures is at 14% which is also pretty good. Now as I did in part 2 of this stats tracking post I want to work out what the percentage of viewers to my articles, then go on to opt-in to my email capture list. Here is how that looks…

8/120 = 0.06 * 100 = 6.6%

It seems that my conversions on articles that link to my sub domains are performing better than the articles that link directly to the product sales page. But as I am yet to make a sale from this email sequence yet, I can’t get a number for the main conversion which would be the visitors to sales number.

However with such a high percentage of people visiting my sub domain site from my artilces, I’m hoping its just a matter of time.

Now I have some real stats to test with, and tweak until I can get as higher conversion rate as I can. Without collecting all this data I would be writing articles with no idea of how they are ever going to perform.

But now I have numbers to compare new ideas and techniques against, thanks to just a little work, and a good ol’ calculator.

I hope you got some good information from these posts? And as always, any questions feel free to leave them below in the comments.

Affiliate Challenge: How To Get Your Article Stats Part 2

admin — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:11:05 +0000

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.