Once managing to find and empower your affiliate team, it’s time to track and measure their performance. The best way to evaluate the performance of your affiliates is to apply quantitative metrics. Quantitative metrics cover all aspects of online marketing that you can represent numerically, the most common metrics are:

• Total sales (the gross number of sales action generated by your affiliates)
• Cost per click/order (The average cost you pay for each click/order)
• Conversion rate (the percentage of referral traffic resulting in sales)
• Average order value (The average revenue from successful transactions)
• Percentage of fraudulent orders.

Now that you are armed with data, you can use in-app reports along with other tracking and analyzing tools to keep track of the health of your affiliate campaign.

Tracking and data reporting

With UpPromote: Affiliate marketing, you can view details of each referral order in Referral tab while observing overall performance on Dashboard in form of graph, chart and table.

Referral tracking

Two basic tracking methods are affiliate link and coupon code, plus, referral can be tracked by other advanced options such as customer emailor SKU. The whole process is automatic, as long as the affiliates share their promotional resources, our system will record if affiliates refer customer, once the order is marked as paid on merchant’s Shopify admin, the referral will be shown on Referral tab:

The referral list will contain the essential information to help you view/check that order: Order ID (order number), total sales, affiliate name, commission, order details,…

Furthermore, you can click on the order ID to view that order immediately on your Shopify Admin. Or to quickly view order information, click View detail icon to see a breakdown of the commission calculation. You can also add a comment on the referral for yourself or your affiliate.

After reviewing the order, you can approve or deny it in order to move to the next step. Plus, in case you find manually approving each referral order is time-consuming, feel free to enable auto-approve referral.

Also on Referral tab, you can apply filter by Affiliate name, Date or Referral Status:

Data reporting

Beside detailed table showing referral on by one on referral tab, on Dashboard, you can keep track of the overall result of your ambassador team.

The reports are respectively:

• Line graph with total clicks/orders/sales within the chosen period:

You can choose whether to view all programs’ performance or each program separately. Moreover, you can fully customize the time range in order to keep track of your team in each period. With the line graph, you can view the affiliate’s performances in different programs as well as different time range.

• Pie charts that sum up your financial results within the chosen time.

The charts help you to easily compare the revenue of total referrals with the commission amount you have to pay your affiliates, also, another chart helps to remind the amount of approved – but not paid- commission beside the paid one.

• Top affiliates

On this table, each affiliate will be listed with detailed information such as: number of clicks, number of referral orders, revenue they bring and commission amount they get,…

You can use the sort function to arrange affiliates on the descending or ascending order on each column.

• Product analytics

With Product analytics, you can view detailed analytics of most preferred products in general and most referred products by affiliate of your shop within the last 30 days.

This table will help you get an overview of which product promotes the most conversion in the recent time, hence, help your marketing team and your affiliate improve their promotional campaign.

According to the provided reporting system, you can view how your ambassador team is doing, then take proper action for each of your publishers.

Keep optimizing your affiliate campaign

Beside in-app provided reports, you can also use other analytic tools to explore how your team is doing such as Google Analytics, Excel,… to create your own report.

Create a monthly or even weekly report about the quantity metrics listed before to review your team regularly, thus, take proper action when affiliates’ performance goes up or down.

Below are some practices to keep improving your affiliate campaign:

Communicate with your affiliate on a regular basis

For an ambassador campaign, the relationship between the affiliate and affiliate manager is crucial because when you communicate with them regularly, you know how your team is doing. Plus, the affiliate team will be better equipped to promote your products to the right people.

Moreover, you can somehow benefit when affiliates share their learnings with you, which can help you guide other affiliates and in-house operations

Activate latent affiliates

On average, only 7–10% of the affiliates registered to a program are actually driving traffic and conversions.

For those members who are on your list but rarely earn new commission, it is possible to convert them back to active members.

Some suggestions would be:

• Give them an increased commission for a limited time ;
• Offer a bonus when they reach their first milestone;
• Keep them up-to-date about new offers, products, and seasonal campaigns;
• Or ask them what they’ve been up to or why they stopped promoting your offer (their sharing could be interesting insight to improve your campaign).

Be aware of the affiliate promotional methods

Some of the most popular methods that affiliate uses to generate traffics are:

1. SEO
2. Social media
3. Blogging
4. Email marketing
5. PPC

However, the list goes much longer than just these 5:

Knowing how your affiliate promoting your business is extremely essential. For example, some affiliate manager will forbid their affiliates to using PPC promotion. Just consider your existing efforts: If your marketing team is running PPC campaigns, it might be counterproductive for your affiliates to run them as well because you risk competing with them in search results.

It is fair that you send your affiliates a list of channels they are allowed to promote in Affiliate guide, once the ambassadors are against the rule, you can send them a warning, deny their referrals or even delete their account.

Be aware of shady affiliate practices.

Not all of your affiliates are professional and decent, some can be plain shady. To understand truly how a member works, keep an eye on his/her activities and where the traffic comes from.

For example, if an affiliate just posts coupon codes that don’t actually offer and relies on searches for a your brand name plus “coupon” term, it apparently does not add much value to your program, or even worse, lower your trustworthy.

To fight such negative actions, be noted to review your affiliates’ tactics.

After all, ensure that you’re paying for quality traffic that you believe bringing benefit to your brand overall.

In conclusion

Affiliate marketing is much more complex than a simple “Affiliates” page in your website footer. It’s a marketing channel that deserves the same attention as any other.

To grow your program, important tasks to keep in mind are: focusing on optimizing the quality of affiliate traffic, carefully measuring the data to evaluate the effectiveness and making sure you communicate enough to know how your team is doing.

On the other hand, keep improving your products and spend time to search for more qualified affiliates will decrease your distance to success!