What I wanted to go over today is a few tips on some of the cool things you can get from checking your affiliate program’s statistics pages a little further than just looking at the “sales” column.

What should we be looking at?

The trouble with the making websites with ads on them is that you’re never really sure WHICH pages and ads are actually working. Well, there’s a way around this.

Most affiliate programs provide a very useful feature when you’re checking your stats called the ‘referrer’. This obviously varies from program to program, as they have all got different programmers etc… but the majority of them will allow you to click a button that will tell you WHERE the sign-up in question came from.

It will display a URL which is the page that the site visitor clicked in order to get to the affiliate program site and place their order.

Another method many programs use is the ability to use sub-ids. Native Remedies‘ program, for example, allows you to set individual sub ids for each link. It simply adds a tag to the end of your affiliate url (&sub=adhd) which you can change as needed and use in a variety of ways. You can use a sub id per site, per page, per product, per traffic campaign, well, you get the picture!

Finding out which ads really WORK!

Suddenly, we have a very valuable tool that we can use in order to see which of our ads are successful. There are some points I’d like to make here.

First of all, if you see that you’ve gotten a sale from one of your pages, then don’t go putting the ad that worked in that case on every single page that you have! It might just be a one-off and nothing to get to excited about.

What you’re actually looking for are pages and campaigns that send more than one sale, as well as PRODUCTS that are sold over and over and are persistently appearing in the ‘referrer’ or sub-id stats at your affiliate program’s sales admin page. You’ll know when you get one of these ads or pages, as it will send you sales month after month. Once you’re finding that you DO have a page like this, it’s time to do some serious analysis and take a good look at what approach this page took.

Look at things like the tone and focus of the text, the graphics that are accompanying it (if any), the product it is pushing, and the positioning… These are all clues as to what it is about this ad that makes it a winner. It’s a good idea to make a print out (in color if possible) to keep as a record of any ads that are hitting 5 or more sales.

What I’ve also done in the past is to make a website on my hard disk that kept all the successful ads in there. It was very useful to be able to see which ads were doing the most for my business.

You might find that some of your affiliate programs do NOT offer this useful feature of being able to trace the URL that send the sign-up. Well don’t worry too much about this. The point is that you only need one or two affiliate programs that have this feature in order to be able to learn from it. And, you can implement your own click and sales tracking software if you really feel the need to do so.

And don’t forget that you can use the same layout and style of, for example, a successful music cd ad on your computer parts sites too. It’s the general feel and layout that will be successful - so just make sure that you convey and carry that over to your future sites.

Summing up…

Using the affiliate program’s built in referrer stats is a great tool that, while not a guaranteed guide as to what will DEFINITELY WORK, is still a helpful guide that can keep you focused on your path to successful sales.