How Does Google Analytics Improve Affiliate Marketing Conversions?

Google has come under fire recently for encrypting organic search referrals, so that webmasters see “not provided” instead of the searcher’s keywords in their referrer logs. This change has led to some webmasters questioning whether there’s any point using analytics at all.  That reaction is understandable, but it’s taking a rather simplistic view of the analytics service and what it has to offer.  Even with the removal of keyword data for an increasing number of searches, Google Analytics still has a lot to offer online marketers.

Social Media Tracking

Social Media is becoming an increasingly important marketing tool. Many webmasters get a huge percentage of their traffic from social media mentions, shares, likes and retweets. If this sounds like your business, then the reach tracking and social media monitoring features of Google Analytics will probably be more important than the now dying-out keyword tracking feature.

Intelligence Alerting

Intelligence Alerts are a handy feature of Google Analytics that will warn you if your campaigns go over-budget, or if you see a drop in conversions, a sudden spike in traffic or anything else out of the ordinary. Intelligence alerts are incredibly useful for busy webmasters. Simply define alerts for the things that are important to you, and Google will notify you by email when those things happen, so you can log on to your control panel and find out more about what’s going on, then fix the problem or take advantage of the circumstances that have caused the traffic spike.

Goals

Now we’re getting to the true meat of the Analytics service. If you aren’t using Goals, you are missing out on a huge intelligence advantage. Webmasters can define all kinds of goals. You can set up goals for “Subscribe to my email list” or “buy my product”, and then watch people as they navigate your site and travel along that goal. Tracking goals in this way is important because it makes it easier for webmasters to see what’s going on with their users. If you are losing a lot of customers at a certain point along the conversion process you can investigate that page and correct whatever issue it is that is driving customers away.

Goals and conversion funnels are an invaluable marketing tool that let you watch what consumers are doing on your website. This tool is great for fixing problems with squeeze pages and signup forms, and figuring out why your conversion rate is not as good as it should be. You can visualize your Goals using the analytics goals funnels function.

Affiliate marketing is a complex task, and you need to have everything finely tuned in order to be successful. If your keyword choices are poor, your SEO is weak, or your squeeze page ineffective, then your business will not be a success. Google Analytics, when used in conjunction with Webmaster Tools and AdWords, can help you to measure, track and understand what is going on with your website.

This article has been written by Philippa L on behalf of the Twist Forum. Philippa has a great deal of knowledge regarding affiliate marketing and has decided to share this knowledge with other affiliate marketers to improve their conversions.