An Affiliate Click Through Rate Using A Top Creators Stats.

How is that website converting? Your click through rate or CTR is how many people are going through a certain link. That is it.

It doesn't mean sales or anything. It means what it means to you. In our case we want to know if someone clicks on an affiliate link does it convert into a sale.

Google Analytics is pretty cool for you to decide

you check your links to your pre-sales page from links around the site
you tracks links coming from adverts to your sales page

Google Analytics is really good for tracking...it is also free. there are plenty of Youtube videos and websites dedicated to learning Analytics- they do a much better job than me.

At least you have an idea of how many people are going to your pre-sales page and how many click on the affiliate link and then how many convert. You can then easily figure out where the weakest link is.

Your affiliate service provider knows and the vendor knows your CTR. In some cases the vendor will tell you.

Just take Mike Geary (one of the most successful eproduct creators on Clickbank). He released on the truthaboutabs.com/affiliate-info.html what his top affiliate is doing (I am unsure it is still there, but the information gleaned is gold). Now we do not know the type of site (pure content, review, ebook) or if they use PPC…but at least we have some info.

Out of this bunch of numbers, can we find the click through rate and see who is actually doing better than others?

The Hops (“The act of a prospective customer clicking on a HopLink referral tracking URL (this does not include clicks received from automated Internet robots, also known as spiders)”) and the net sales are what we are looking at here. We can roughly work out the CTR:

So for the top four affiliates (excluding the 0 amount of hops, which might be Mike’s own site) over a 7 day period, we have a CTR of 0.3%, 0.2% and 0.1%. Oddly enough one of the best CRT is the hop# 191, which gives an 8.3% CTR…but is much lower than the other affiliates in ranking. This might be because they just don't have the traffic or have placed the ads or affiliate links properly.

So the best affiliates are actually loosing sales. Is this because they believe that funnelling tons of traffic is helpful or do they not believe in the product? For that low CTR something is wrong…but do they know, do they care or do they track?

Probably not.

Why? Have you seen the amount of refunds that they are getting? They more than likely haven’t read the product, they do not know anything about it. Repeat sales from the same customers from the affiliate’s list will only appear if the product lives up to the expectations. This is just the marketing machine at work.

Actually the better marketers are the ones that are getting more sales with less traffic. Because they know that their system is working. So let’s do some more maths.

Remember the 8.3% CTR…how about if they increase their hops by 100, so 291…how many sales then? We get a jump up to 24 sales, which then makes the affiliate $672 for one weeks work.

Oddly enough Mike actually praises the top affiliates and bunches up the lower sales/ day ones. But the stats are actually praising the lower ones and calling the top ones odd.

Refund rates are going to be ever present- either through fraudulent means (they buy the ebook and then refund it) or because they did not find what they were looking for. The average refund rate is between 0-8% with 8% being pretty high. With the affiliate above the refund rate is between 2-5%.

Can you reduce the rate?

Yes you can.

If you rely upon the sales page it might be too much- too much boasting and very little content- expectations are high and the value is very minimal.

If you rely on yourself to “pick a product” from the top of vendor lists then you do not know the product. You are recommending something that you have little/ no knowledge on. The CTR and refund rate will be random depending on the quality of traffic that you funnel through and the type of site that you build (review sites get good CTR clicks but also they get refunds because usually they are built with no product research or even product viewing). CTR and refund rates are directly linked to the quality of the traffic and the traffic wants (the previous Systems).

But can funnels help us. Yes they can, but as always we can add to funnels. This is our 3 funnel system.

This series is taken from the ebook Superstar Affiliate Product Finder which can be found on Amazon here