Affiliate Managers: Your Top Five Biggest Affiliate Program Mistakes - Not Providing Your Affiliates With Useful, Real-Time Statistics
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All marketers rely on statistics to measure the effectiveness of any marketing campaign. Yet most affiliate programs only provide their affiliates with basic statistics such as number of visitors sent, number of sales, and commission earned. These statistics aren't much help to affiliates who want to measure the effectiveness of a particular pay per click campaign.
Affiliate managers - please consider providing these useful statistics so that I can market your products effectively:
- Archive of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly statistics and by date range.
- Commission earned, broken down by product or service, and how the customer was referred to the site.
- Daily email update of all affiliate statistics.
- Instant email notification of a new affiliate.
- Instant email notification of a new free trial sign up.
- Instant email notification of a new sale and all relevant statistics. I love getting new sales notification emails!
- Number of free trial downloads or subscriptions.
- Number of returns and all relevant statistics.
- Affiliate links with trackable IDs, so that affiliates can tell exactly which site, or ad campaign is sending the referrals and sales.
- Unique clicks - which refers to the unique number of visitors referred - in addition to raw clicks - which refers to the total number of click throughs.
- A list of top performing affiliate statistics, so that affiliates can compare how they're doing and which areas they can improve on.
- Include the most important statistics at the top of the email and subject line. There's nothing worse than having to scroll down to see what the referral purchased or how much commission I have made.
The following only apply if the affiliate program offers more than one level of commissions.
- Commission earned as a result of referrals sent by 2nd-tier affiliates.
- Commission earned, broken down by commission level.
- Number of 2nd-tier affiliates referred.
I've been promoting products and services via affiliate programs since 1997 and I have yet to come across an affiliate program that provides anything close to these statistics.
Next: Not Compensating Your Affiliates Fairly for Their Hard Work
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