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Today we tried to figure out which 10 KPIs you need to track in B2B affiliate marketing, what should you look out for first? Anyway, what performance indicators can be considered key? We do not pretend to be the ultimate truth. There are so many marketers whose field of activity is affiliate marketing, so many opinions about exactly which metrics should be monitored.
Affiliate marketing is a field in which there are always several parties: an advertiser, an affiliate and an online platform, which provides them with convenient tools. Primarily for analytics. Plus, do not forget that affiliate marketing would not have been possible without the presence of one more, most important participant – a client who brings money to the advertiser, partner, online platform.
As the famous marketer Peter Ferdinand Drucker once said, “You can only manage what you can measure.”
So what are the essential metrics to track in B2B affiliate marketing?
TOP 10 performance indicators in affiliate marketing
Growth of income
Perhaps this is the key metric that should be monitored not only by affiliate marketing, but by any company that does business. Incomes and profits do not grow, so this is no longer a business at all.
Conversion
It is unlikely that tracking such an efficiency indicator as conversion – the required user action (purchase, registration, installation of an application, etc.) – requires some explanation.
As mentioned above, revenue growth is a metric that should definitely be used when analyzing the effectiveness of any business, but in affiliate marketing, conversion tracking can be rightfully put in the first place.
Sales and any monetary objectives. For example, making a deposit.
For your information, Alanbase’s SaaS platform has unique statistics settings that will be useful to those who work on the Revshare model. Both the webmaster and the product owner will receive objective information in Alanbase.
The cost of attracting a customer – CAC (customer acquisition cost).
There are different formulas for this metric, but the simplest and most understandable one looks like this: you need to divide the total amount of marketing and sales costs by the number of attracted customers. The lower the cost per client, the more effective affiliate marketing works.
All metrics for traffic sources and transitions from them.Any webmaster who promotes an offer from any affiliate program wants to know where potential customers come from, and if not, why? To track this information in affiliate marketing, you need to use utm-tags or subIDs, if a specific affiliate program provides such an opportunity.
- You can get data such as:
- the source of traffic from which the transition was made,
- a specific advertising campaign,
- the creative inside the ad campaign came, which was clicked,
- keywords for which a potential client.
CPC – cost per click.
We want to know how much each click costs us until the conversion happens? Therefore, we monitor this performance indicator when working with any partner programs in Russia, Ukraine, CIS countries, and far abroad.
CTR (click-through rate of an ad creative).
A very important performance metric, which is defined as the ratio of clicks to impressions of an ad or creative multiplied by 100%. The CTR values will differ for different traffic sources. One thing is for sure: the higher the CTR, the more effective a particular ad will work in affiliate marketing.
EPS – partner’s income from one click on a creative in an advertising campaign.
This indicator is very fond of measuring and showing affiliate programs, although it is more like the average temperature in a hospital. It is far from the fact that two different partners will have the same income per click. EPS is more of a benchmark, as could ideally be.
ROI
Return on Investment. Another key performance indicator, without which affiliate marketing is impossible.
The ROI indicator must be taken into account when working with any affiliate program and when assessing the effectiveness of each advertising source. If the ROI is less than 100%, then the budget has been drained. Accordingly, if the figures for this performance indicator are less than 100%, you urgently need to optimize the advertising campaign or change the source.
ROI calculation formula: (Income from investments in advertising – investments) / Investments * 100%.
LTV – Life Time Value – profit from the customer’s life cycle.
Data on how much the client pays to the company for the entire period of cooperation with it. This metric is unlikely to interest the partner, but the owner of the product or SaaS platform will give food for thought and will allow them to work on increasing this indicator to generate more profit.
Instead of conclusion
Remind me of the phrase of a famous marketer: you can only manage what is accountable.
It would seem that any marketing is constantly in an environment of certainty. Will shoot – will not shoot. If it works, it won’t. Sometimes, until the last moment, no one understands why this particular advertising campaign or this particular creative, which is called “entered”, and everything that happened before that did not force customers to open their wallets.
This is all true. There is an element of unpredictability in marketing. Therefore, everything begins with the stage of testing hypotheses. But even at this stage, it is necessary to track key indicators in order to understand whether we are moving in the right direction or not.
A company can generate profit based on a pool of stable data. If the collection of statistics and further analysis of the information received is not given due attention, you can take and burn all the money that you planned to invest in business development. The effect will be the same.
