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Making use of analytics to boost the efficiency of the affiliate program has become well known these days. Nearly all affiliate marketing programs offer data to merchants that can be used to evaluate how the affiliate program operates.  

This data can come in handy, particularly when merchants face a slump in their sales, by using this analytical data, merchants can tweak around their affiliate program and make it much more efficient. 

Here we take a look at some of the data points that can be used by merchants to improve their program’s performance:

Number of Unique Visits

A lot of people think that the number of visits is the same as the number of clicks, however, that is not the case. The number of unique visits signifies the times a unique visitor has visited the store using an affiliate’s referral, whereas clicks are the total number of times a referral link has been clicked. 

The number of unique visits can tell how well the affiliate promotions are working. Since better promotions would mean a higher number of people visiting the store. If this is not the case, improvement in affiliate promotions could be needed to bump up the count of unique visitors to the store. This number of visits also shows how broadly are affiliate promotions targeting visitors. 

Conversions & Orders

Converting a visitor to a customer is an essential part of running an online store. While affiliate marketing will help in bringing visitors to the store, various factors such as the good products, discounts, or even the design of the store, can largely contribute to converting a visitor into a customer. An important metric to keep an eye on here is the conversion percentage, it tells you how many visitors are making purchases in the store. 

A higher conversion rate would mean a more number of sales. In the case of a lower conversion rate, merchants can look at changes such as making the process of purchasing on the store easier and quicker, providing discounts or even providing more number of supported payment methods can go a long way in increasing the conversion rate. 

After a successful conversion, a visit can be converted into an order. The number of orders can help in telling you how many visitors have made purchases in your store and can be used to track the performance of affiliates by the metric of how many customers they are bringing to your store. 

Revenue and Commission

The revenue will tell the merchant the referral order’s amount. This can also give an idea of what products are being promoted and sold using affiliate referrals. This will also inform the merchant about the performance of affiliates in their program, a higher performance equates to more revenue an affiliate brings to the store. 

Higher affiliate revenue is not only good for the merchant but is also beneficial for the affiliate since, higher revenue means more commission for the affiliate. The commission data shows how much commission affiliates have earned from their referral sales. Revenue and commission data combined can give a broader idea to the merchant on how the affiliate is performing and how effectively are the affiliate’s promotions working. 

All of this data and more can be used by merchants to improve the performance of their affiliate programs, steps can be taken to make the affiliate program leaner by using resources carefully and guidance can be provided to affiliates to improve their performance. Therefore, this analytical data can be used to significantly make the program more efficient and get more out of it.