We Share 10 Affiliate Marketing Metrics Every Publisher Should Track

Helpful Summary

• Overview: In this article, we focus on 10 essential metrics that affiliate marketing publishers should track to evaluate and optimize their affiliate programs.

• Why You Can Trust Us: Strackr has proven successful with clients like Thuis Atleet and Capital Koala by centralizing data and improving efficiency, making tracking and analyzing key metrics easier.

• Why It Matters: Tracking these metrics helps publishers make informed decisions, optimize strategies, and maximize ROI. It provides insights into traffic sources, conversion rates, revenue, and other essential data points.

• Action Points: We recommend using Strackr to consolidate and monitor important metrics like conversion rates, EPC, and commission rates, enabling better strategy and decision-making.

• Further Research: Explore case studies of successful affiliate programs and use Strackr’s dashboard to integrate and streamline your metric tracking.

Curious Which Metrics You Should Prioritize for Your Affiliate Marketing Program?

So, you’ve launched an affiliate program. But how do you know if your affiliate sales are meeting your expectations? Like with every other marketing campaign, setting SMART goals and tracking metrics will fuel your success as an affiliate.

But what affiliate marketing metrics should you prioritize? In this Strackr guide, we’ll share 10 important metrics every publisher should track for their program.

Why Listen To Us?

Why Strackr? Strackr has a proven track record of helping affiliate marketers track key metrics by consolidating them into one dashboard. Our success stories, like Thuis Atleet's struggle with multiple networks and sites, demonstrate how Strackr's solution centralized their data, improving efficiency and performance analysis​.

Having these metrics in one place allows for better decision-making and strategy optimization. Clients like Capital Koala have benefitted from real-time data and detailed reports, which help them stay competitive and maximize their affiliate marketing ROI​.

What Are Affiliate Marketing Metrics?

Affiliate marketing metrics are essential for both affiliates and brands. The insights these metrics provide help determine whether an affiliate campaign is useful – what’s working and what needs improvement.

Why is it Important to Track These Metrics?

By assessing these metrics, you can achieve the following:

Make Informed Decisions

Tracking affiliate marketing metrics allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t, guiding data-driven decisions. Analyzing traffic sources, conversion rates, and revenue helps identify the most successful strategies and areas for improvement.

Optimize Strategies

By tracking metrics, you can refine your affiliate marketing strategies, as this highlights improvement areas. Examining click-through rate (CTR), earnings per click (EPC), and average order value (AOV) helps improve content, target audiences more effectively, and enhance promotional techniques.

Maximize ROI

Monitoring metrics such as cost-per-click (CPC), cost per sale (CPS), and return on investment (ROI) ensures marketing efforts are profitable. Identifying profitable tactics and minimizing chargebacks maximizes ROIs.

10 Affiliate Marketing Metrics You Must Track

Here are 10 affiliate marketing metrics that should be on your list. We have organized them according to the logical flow from traffic to revenue. Let’s begin.

1. Traffic Sources

Publishers in affiliate marketing must track traffic sources. Determining where the traffic is coming from – organic search, email marketing, or social media – helps you optimize your strategies for better performance.

Understanding which channels attract the most visitors will allow you to focus on high-performing sources, tailor your content to what your audience likes, and improve engagement and conversion rates as well.

NerdWallet tracks traffic sources for its affiliate marketing program. By analyzing where visitors come from, they can tailor their strategies to enhance performance and maximize conversions.

2. Click-Through Rate

Click-through-rate (CTR) measures the percentage of clicks on affiliate links compared to the total number of impressions. This helps publishers understand how engaging their content is. By tracking CTR, you can identify which links and content are most useful at capturing your audience's interest, allowing you to optimize your strategies for higher engagement and better conversion rates. High CTR indicates compelling content and successful targeting.

NerdWallet is also the best example of this because it tracks click-through rates, such as using affiliate links, for its affiliate marketing program. They provide highly personalized recommendations and use detailed product comparison tools to boost their affiliate commissions.

3. Cost-Per-Click and Cost Per Sale

These two performance metrics are valuable when benchmarked against other marketing channels, say Facebook ads or AdWords. They establish the average price you’ve paid for every new customer acquisition.

4. Conversion Rate

One of the most commonly used metrics, conversion rate, relates to the percentage of affiliate link clicks that lead to a purchase. Tracking your conversion rate will help you evaluate affiliate performance and determine top performers. In addition, monitoring this also allows you to assess the efficacy of your program compared to other marketing channels.

Our tool, Strackr, helps you access conversion rate as one of the metrics to track, making it easier to choose which programs to promote. Plus, you can access this from all your affiliate platforms on one navigable dashboard.

5. Earnings Per Click (EPC)

EPC is also an essential metric for affiliate marketing publishers. It represents the average earnings generated per click on an affiliate link. This metric directly evaluates the profitability of clicks, offering insights into which links and affiliates yield the highest returns. Publishers use EPC to optimize content and partnerships, focusing on maximizing revenue from each visitor interaction with affiliate links.

EPC is another metric you can access with our tool. Strackr has dashboards and monitoring tools that allow you to track this business-critical metric easily. You can view your EPC globally or drill down by network, advertiser, category, or multi-site view.

6. Average Order Value (AOV)

AOV is likewise an essential metric for publishers to track, as it measures the average amount spent for each purchase via affiliate links. It provides helpful insights into your audience's purchasing behaviors, helping you tailor content and promotions to maximize your revenue per transaction. By tracking AOV, you can optimize your strategies to attract higher-value purchases and improve the profits pouring into your program.

GearJunkie, an outdoor equipment review site, tracks its affiliate marketing program’s AOV by providing in-depth reviews and personalized recommendations. With these, they’re able to optimize their marketing strategies and improve their AOV as well.

7. Revenue

Monitoring how much your affiliate marketing program earns should be a no-brainer. However, several businesses get so obsessed with measuring other metrics that revenue takes a backseat. This should not be the case. Revenue is the ultimate goal; tracking it should always be a priority.

Aside from measuring revenue during a particular period, there are two other beneficial ways to track this:

• Your affiliate program’s total revenue growth over time

• Incremental revenue, or revenue you wouldn’t have generated without a program that you can’t attribute to other channels, like paid ads or email

BuzzFeed successfully monitors revenue for their affiliate marketing program in a rather impressive way: by partnering with other top companies like Amazon. They create engaging content that encourages readers to buy, thus generating commissions from sales​.

8. Commission Rate

Commission rate is equally important for publishers in affiliate marketing. This represents the percent of the sale amount earned as commission. Tracking this is essential as it directly impacts revenue and profitability.

By monitoring fluctuations in commission rates, you can strategically choose and prioritize programs that offer the highest earnings potential. This enables you to optimize your affiliate marketing efforts and maximize your overall revenue from affiliate partnerships, like how BuzzFeed did with Amazon.

Our tool also helps you access RevShare (your commission). RevShare is where advertisers share a predefined product or service price percentage with you. We have features that can help you understand the true value of your affiliate data so you can increase your revenue. 

9. Return on Investment

This is a valuable metric when publishers deal with rigorous budget planning. ROI, otherwise called ROAS, can be calculated in many ways. The most common method involves dividing the earned affiliate revenue by the amount spent (commissions paid to affiliates, affiliate management, affiliate system usage costs, etc.)

HubSpot tracks ROI for its affiliate marketing program by encouraging its affiliate partners to document and share their experiences using the HubSpot platform, thus providing detailed performance insights.

10. Reversed Sales Rate or Chargeback Rate

Tracking this will provide valuable information about the quality of the traffic your partners are sending to your site. For example, seeing a chargeback rate of more than 10 percent of sales isn’t good. This indicates that the affiliate sending the traffic might not promote your product to the right audience or exaggerate some of its features just to obtain conversion.

Conclusion

By this time, you already know which affiliate marketing metrics are important. You’re more than ready to decide which ones to track and how often you’ll check up on them. Remember to choose a wide range of metrics to get the context you need.

However, before you can track these metrics, you must access them. What if you have several affiliate platforms? It's more difficult, right? Not with Strackr. You can access metrics like Revshare, conversion rate, and EPC, monitor everything, compare, and export. You can also get your data in CSV, Excel, and PNG with just a few clicks.

Discover Strackr. Try it for free today.