How to Track Your Affiliate Marketing Conversions

If you are looking to improve your affiliate marketing conversions then you must be ready to step up to the next level. Beginners tend to try a lot of shotgun approaches to see what works in this business. But once you learn the basics you discover that the pros are using web analytics to get a better sense of what their visitors are looking for.

And now it’s time for you to make this crucial jump. The business of affiliate marketing is in getting the customer and converting the sale, and an analytics tool is a vital part of your war chest to improve your online performance by looking for trends in your web traffic.

The Google Analytics Tool

Google Analytics is a free traffic monitoring tool that collects and analyzes data about a website’s visitors. It seems that nearly every webmaster and affiliate marketer is using it or has used it at one time.

Affiliate marketers who aren’t yet using such tools are likely wasting a lot of time, effort, and money by not properly monetizing their websites. Once you can clearly see what is working and what isn’t, you are better able to concentrate your efforts on the keywords and pages that convert into sales and affiliate marketing commissions -- and correct other areas that aren’t producing.

What You’ll See and Learn

From the keyword phrases used by visitors, to the referring URLs, you’ll be amazed at what you can learn by using Google Analytics. Do you want to know how long your visitors stay? Did your visitors come via a search engine, a directory, or another website? And how can you expect to track your affiliate marketing conversions if you don’t know which page is the most popular and getting a lot of hits?

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Here’s an example. Let’s say your site or blog reviews popular diet plans and you happen to mention some exercises on toning the abs and butt in an article. You read your web analytics results and they reveal that your site ranks in the top five positions in the SERPs for the keywords “workouts for gluts.” Quel surprise! Whatever people were searching for, they found your site via that keyword phrase.

The data doesn’t lie: you’ll quickly get the idea of which keywords are working and which aren’t working and why your site is failing at affiliate marketing conversions for dieting keywords.

Are Two Web Analytics Tools Better Than One?

You can run more than one analytics tools to improve your website’s conversions since many of them have different strengths and weaknesses. If Google Analytics seems a tad overwhelming or you don’t like the idea putting all your eggs in Google’s sometimes fickle basket, you have the option of going with another tool that will track data and affiliate marketing conversions.

There are dozens of free and low cost programs available for web analytics that affiliate marketers should consider including: Omniture, StatCounter, Getclicky, ClickTracks, and Sitemeter to name just a few. Most of them are easy to set up -- for example, to start using Google Analytics just insert the JavaScript tag in your site’s footer file.

Useful for All Purposes But Vital for PPC

Without using some type of web analytics, you’re stumbling around in the dark and not only wasting time doing the SEO for unpaid search terms, but you’re especially wasting money in pay-per-click advertising. Your goal is to maximize your affiliate marketing conversions but that simply can not happen without proper data results and analysis for paid search terms. Analytics is one of the most overlooked aspects of marketing and new affiliates will make great strides in their online revenue by using these tools to improve conversions.

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