GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 17 - September 2011

By Louis Deering N owadays, affiliate marketing is a numbers game. Perhaps long ago, before the rise of analytics and web tracking, marketing may have been a “soft science,” requiring as much intuition as analytical skill, but this is no longer the case. In the business world of today, marketers live and die by minute percentage-point shifts in conversion rates or costs-per-acquisition, gained from carefully studying user data. This data is more readily and affordably available than ever before. Free services like Google Analytics or Stats Remote continue to enter the market, while paid services like Syntryx or SEOmoz continue to increase their value, providing ever- improving data tracking, organization and analysis. Access to valuable data that was previously limited to top firms with large budgets is now available to any independent marketer. This levels the playing field and allows the scrupulous analyst to get ahead. However, with so much data available, it can be difficult to know where to look. Marketers can suffer from “information overload” (or as more recently proposed, “filter failure”) if they do not have a proper structure to their data analysis. What statistics should you be paying particular attention to? What tools are available to help you analyze these statistics? And how should you conduct your evaluation to yield the best results? Affiliate Marketing by the Numbers An Affiliate’s Guide to Benefiting from Statistical Analysis Affiliate Marketing by the Numbers