Affiliate marketing tips: using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a useful tool for all webmasters, but it is especially valuable for affiliate marketers.  Here are a few affiliate tips to help you make the most of your Google Analytics account.

What is Google Analytics?

Most people think of Google Analytics as being a free online stats tracking tool – like AwStats or Webalizer, but hosted off-site instead of on your server.  This is an unfortunate perception because there is far more to Analytics than just counting incoming visitors and seeing where they’re coming from.

Affiliate marketers can learn a lot about what is and is not working on their site, if they configure Google Analytics correctly and know how to interpret the data.

What can you do with Google Analytics?

You can analyse almost anything that’s happening on your site using your Google Analytics account, for example:

• Tracking email signups:  Set a URL destination goal in your Analytics account that points to the thank you page that visitors see afer they have signed up to your mailing list.  Once the goal is created, you’ll be able to see a counter for the number of successful conversions to that goal, and the conversion rate.  If you set up a funnel to get people to sign up, you’ll be able to see where you’re losing visitors and hone your signup pages to fix the problem.
• Get an efficiency report: Use this useful reporting tool, created by Avinash Kaushik, to create a Page Efficiency Report.  This report shows you which pages are attracting the most visitors, and which pages are keeping visitors.  If you’re trying a few different designs of squeeze page, or experimenting with different lengths and tones in your blog posts, this will help you to figure out what visitors like, and what isn’t working.
• Understand organic search: There’s a good chance that you’re getting a lot of traffic from organic search results, but are you getting as much as you could be? Check the Queries section of the Traffic Sources | SEO page to find out what people are searching for. You may be surprised at some of the queries that are bringing traffic to your site.  Try to diversify your keywords.  Good query diversity is a sign of a healthy SEO strategy.
• Intelligence alerting: You can configure intelligence alerts for a range of events, including an unusually high or low number of visits, a change to your bounce rate, or a change to the number of page views you’re getting.  These alerts can act as an early warning signal – you might get an alert if your traffic plummets because your server has gone down, or if Google Adwords decides to cancel or smart match your campaign and send a lot of useless traffic your way.

There are many other things that you can do with Google Analytics.  Take some time to browse the custom reports and familiarize yourself with the power of this tool.  The saying “Knowledge is power” is more than just a cliché. The more you know about your visitors, where they come from, and what they’re doing on your site, the better position you’ll be in to turn those visitors into buyers.