Affiliate Marketing: Other Goals to Watch Beyond Revenue

When it comes to affiliate marketing, it’s imperative to stay on top of the metrics affecting your business and brand awareness, such as traffic and the number of active affiliates.

An effective affiliate marketing strategy mustn’t stop at revenue and sales. It should also revolve around the engagement of your affiliates, chargeback rates, and so on.

It stands true that most business owners using an affiliate program are primarily concerned with revenue, which is acceptable. But, to reap all the benefits of affiliate marketing, a business owner must look beyond revenue prospects.

As part of our guide to affiliate marketing, we offer you a perspective on fundamental affiliate-related metrics to consider to make the most for your brand.

Other Metrics to Watch

Of course, revenue is the foundation of every company, keeping it afloat. However, it is not the sole factor that dictates whether your business will flourish – additional variables, such as affiliates, also come into play.

For one, the main reason budding businesses partner up with affiliates is to augment their chances for profit and reach a broader audience. However, there’s more to affiliate partnerships than just pounds and pennies – there are other equally essential metrics to remember.

Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are essential KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in eCommerce. Conversion rates show how many of your site’s visitors take action, whether it’s a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or any activity other than simply browsing through your page.

If you see low conversion rates, much lower than predicted, you might want to improve your SaaS affiliate program by assessing your affiliates’ compatibility with your brand’s goal.

Affiliate-related conversion rates allow business owners to get insight into the effectiveness of their affiliates. High conversion rates of over 10% mean that your affiliate is performing well with endorsing your products. For affiliate marketing, the higher the conversion rates, the better the chances of retaining customers.

Clicks

The number of clicks your product gets will show how well the affiliates perform within their network. More clicks mean your product has increased exposure to potential customers. However, there’s an aspect to the number of clicks to be considered.

If you use an affiliate tracking platform and see an insanely high number of clicks that have driven few sales or none, it can be a sign of an unsuccessful affiliate marketing strategy.

The same scenario could also mean inaccurate affiliate tracking or a discrepancy in your business expectations and factual states on the market, in which case further research is needed.

Cost per Click vs. Cost per Sale

This particular metric will allow you to leverage your ad investment against the sale numbers and achieve affiliate marketing success. As in traditional marketing campaigns, if a particular ad campaign costs you more than what you make in sales, it’s an indicator you need to re-evaluate your marketing needs and business expectations.

The two performance indicators are valuable KPIs that grant you insight into the cost-to-value ratio so you can take adequate measures to improve turnover.

Type of Engaged Affiliates

In essence, affiliates receive evaluation based on their ability to convert clicks into sales.

Categorising your affiliates according to their marketing capabilities to generate traffic (or not) will offer you a better understanding of user behaviour. Moreover, you’ll gain insight into how the affiliates promote your product and whether the manner is efficient.

Segmenting your affiliates into high-performing, and medium-performing, for example, can help you decide which ones to reward and which could use some pointers for the future. For instance, you can check out this guide for SaaS affiliate commissions and see how to manage commissions according to performance.

Conclusion: Value Your KPIs

Key Performance Indicators, KPIs for short, offer a quantifiable measure of the level of performance in a given timeframe and with a specific business goal in mind.

For business owners looking to secure themselves a spot within the market, monitoring the KPIs is as crucial as making revenue. The same goes for leading corporations that have been in the industry for decades and want to maintain their position.

Conversion rates, clicks, types of affiliate engagement, and cost per click vs. cost per sale are only some essential KPIs to keep in check for your business to stay afloat.