If you are going to be in affiliate marketing for any length of time, you are going to experience ups and downs. It’s just a fact of life. One day you are the king of the world and trying to decide what color your new sportscar should be, and the next day you are wondering where your next meal will come from. That may be exaggerating a bit, but everyone experiences big swings.
I’d say the biggest frustration for me with affilate marketing is tracking issues. No matter how hard you try, it’s just not possible to reconcile the number of clicks shown by the PPC engine, against what you show in your landing page logs, against what your affiliate network says. There will never be an exact match. I actually attended a session at pubcon where the guy did a whole hour about the life cycle of a single click from PPC to affiliate. It was pretty amazing, and I really wish I had taken better notes. Basically the summary of his lecture was that due the nature of the Internet, clicks can never match up. It’s a hard thing to come to terms with, especially when you are talking your hard earned money. But it’s just something you have to get comfortable with I suppose and build into your margins when running calculations.
In the last week I have had to make some drastic changes in how I do things. I have implemented a totally new tracking system, which should keep tracking issues to a minimum and allow me to better see what is actually happening with my PPC campaigns. Then when the ups and downs come, I should be better suited to figure out why.
haha
What type of tracking system are you implementing? Can you name any scripts/software packages made for affiliates?
why did you ‘have to make some drastic changes’?
what happened? :p
Great blog…thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.
Kyle asks a good question. Is there any efficient tracking program out there?
Also, would you mind sharing with us, in rough numbers, how many sites you run at once?
I can give you an Amen on that. Just when you think you got things rocking and rolling. G Bot hits you with QS or MSN kicks 25% of words out for no reason or Y removes words for no reason… Its a daily cycle of ups and downs. but as you level those out it does get better
Which bringsa good point of while your on top dont blow all your money on women and cars invest into something you will have for life like a home atleast if you end up broek (not likely to happen) u have a roof over your head.
Kyle/Jump Cut,
It’s a custom system that takes a hash of the IP, referr data, timestamp, geo info, etc. then dumps it into a Mysql db so I can sort and run reports. There are many pre built systems out there for affiliates. Clicktracks, Adwatcher are a couple that come to mind. There is also a PHP open source system but I can’t remember it right now.
Matt,
I had to make drastic changes because I got hit by some big time click fraud. I a more needed a more effecient way to report and track fraud.
CPA Aff,
Totally agree about being conservative with profits! I either invest or reinvest all earnings back into the business. I already have a home, and the sports car will have to wait until Google or Yahoo buys one of my sites for 10 million
ou should definitely test any landing page. Testing is like what you would do with A/B Testing or some sort of multi-variate testing. Without testing, all you will receive is junk traffic to your landing page. Traffic that is either not converting (what pays you the affiliate at the end of the day). Seek out testing services or look at some examples of A/B Testing.