Measuring your success on multiple sites
Posted by: Greg Comments: (4) Date: March 13, 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I was reading a great post today on 45n5.com about measuring the right things when it comes to your various websites. I know a few affiliates on PAP that run 10+ sites and have a hard time monitoring all the analytics that lead to their successes and failures.
Most common are the excel spreadsheets that most of us just copy and paste information on to. We pull up our affiliate reports and then see how many clicks, RMP’s and deposits we had from each tracking link. Hopefully everyone is using individual links for each banner/text link they are promoting if they are placing them on more than 1 portal; or even more than one location on the site. If you are then good work and it’s time to start measuring more in depth.
Deposits and revenue share are the most important numbers to each of us. However, setting goals and checking out what they were/were not reached is also vital. Setting goals is the first step to take once you have an idea how your site is performing. After that it’s time to track and chart out what’s really happening.
I suggest charting out all your sites on one sheet and then looking at the ‘vital factors’ for each domain. The post above suggests the following analytics: Unique visitors, Conversions, Subscribers, Total Site Earnings, Feed Subscribers, Indexed pages in Google and comment count (for blogs).
While some of these may not apply to your site you can start to get an idea that more is involved than just the information provided by the affiliate sites alone. Get an idea of what’s happening on your sites and how other things you are doing successfully can be applied across the board.
If you have any other ideas or metrics that could be useful please comment here and share.
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Use your prize wisely.
March 13th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I believe it is really hard to evaluate the success of many websites. I use an Excel spreadsheet, updated every two months, but without some valuable information. For this reason, it took me some months to realize that the site giving a higher profit was my secondary one
March 13th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
No question that this happens all the time and goes undetected. I really think that evaluating a few more metrics allows us to really see whats going on with our sites and WHY or WHY NOT they are making us money.
Creating the template is a bit rough, but the data is very helpful once collected.
March 13th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Definitely true. Also, I have been checking the balance in full - expenses and profit - never thought about measuring per site, which was a great tip.
March 13th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Yea the whole idea came up from speaking with a PAP member who runs literally 100 sites and was confused on why some performed so well and others didnt. He told me that on his blog network that his wordpress sites were down but his blogger sites were doing well. It came down to a linkback he had recieved from Google News that was helping him out on that particular netowrk of sites.
It’s a little more work but it really is maximzing on what you’ve already invested in.