Monitor Your Marketing Effectiveness! Now that you have your blog or website setup and your affiliate banners up, and you are getting more free traffic to your website through the previous tips, you must be wondering now, how do you tell the effectiveness of your marketing activities? In order to measure the effectiveness of your marketing activites, you need to know several information. Sales Number The most important number that you need to know... how much did you sell? You can get that number very easily from your affiliate member page. Hits On Your Affiliate Link The second most important number that you need to know. Again, you can get that easily from your affiliate member account. Hits On Your Website The total number of hits on your website. You can get that from your personal web counter. Referrer URL Where are the visitors to your website coming from? You can track that using free monitoring tools like what HYIP.com. Cost Of Marketing If you are using paid marketing like Google Adwords, You will need to know how much you are paying every month. That you should be able to get from your respective ad providers. With these numbers on hand, you can now start to do some calculations: Sales Conversion Rate Sales Number (per month) divided by Hits On Your Affiliate Link (per month) This number tells you the percentage of click throughs to your affiliate link that actually results in a sale. A common conversion rate is about 0.4% to 0.5%. 2 main factors affect your conversion rate. One, are the people who are clicking through your affiliate link the kind of people who are likely to sign up for our products and services? Certainly kids or people with completely no income or no interest in money making through the capital markets would not result in a sale. Two, the persuasiveness of the merchant site... well, that's my challenge to solve. :) Clickthrough Rate Hits On Your Affiliate Link (per month) divided by Hits On Your Website (per month) This number tells you the percentage of visitors to your website who actually click onto your affiliate link. Obviously the more people who click on your affiliate links, the more likely you are to make a sale. 2 factors affect this percentage. One, Placement of your affiliate links. Where you place your affiliate links is very important and directly affect how many people click through on them. It has been scientifically proven that people look at and click on the top lefthand corner and the bottom of every website. Therefore, if you can place your affiliate link or banner on these critical areas, you should experience a higher clickthrough rate. Two, again, the people who are coming to your website. Are you getting the kind of traffic that is interested in what you are offering? Cost Per Conversion Cost Of Marketing (per month) divided by Sales Number (per month) This is a very important number to know if you are already using paid marketing. You want to make sure that your Cost Per Conversion is lesser than the commission per sale that you are recieving in order to make sense. With these techniques, you will be able to more scientifically monitor and improve on your marketing efforts and to optimise your profitability. Copyright 2007, Jason Ng, Founder - MastersoEquity.com