As an affiliate manager and an affiliate, I am in the lucky position to see all sides of the affiliate marketing work, with clients, they want sales, thats their primary need. For the network, the primary need is sales, however for the affiliate their need is more traffic. As an affiliate manager I have to try and make this equation work, and really its all about the numbers. Lucky for me, i’m a bit of a stats fanatic, ironic really considering I once nearly failed GCSE maths and fell out with my dad over the matter.

So what numbers are important? Obviously they differ for the merchant, network and affiliate, but there are some bottom link common stats all sides will look at.

Impressions, Click and sales

These three are the most basic level stats, Impressions look at the number of times a creative appears and gives an idea of how many people have been exposed to the ad.

Clicks refers to the number of times a creative has been clicked on, ie. the number of times a consumer has expressed an interest in the creative and the products advertised in the ad.

Dependant on the program, sales can be a number of leads x commission, or the value of the products bought.

Commission- for an affiliate this is another key number, after all this is what they are likely to earn.

using this raw data, there are a series of equations that we can get, these equations help affiliate managers to provide stats for both affiliates and clients to give an estimation on how the program is performing. for the network this also provides us with the stats (when all programs are taken into account) to track the performance of the network, allocate time and give us an idea of where to focus our efforts.

clicks/ impressions = click though rate- this helps us to determine the effectiveness of the creative, the higher this percentage, naturally the better the creative.

number of sales/ clicks = conversion rate, essentially this helps give use an idea of how good a clients site is, or how relevant the site is to the creative, whist this number is not really changeable for affiliates, affiliate managers work with the clients to improve this and increase the number of conversions for a campaign.

value of commission x number of sales (total commissions earned) /clicks= earning per click, this is probably the most significant number for affiliates, if you consider each click as a potential buyer, the higher the value, nautrally the more an affiliate is likely to earn.

Whilst there are more numbers to consider, by having a good understanding of what affects these numbers can help to drastically improve a campaign’s performance and return, rewarding, the affiliate, the network and the client.