We will never tire of repeating that data is the key to success in affiliate marketing, where success actually means making money. And certainly it is rather difficult to know what all that data mean and what you should focus on, especially for newbies. But you have to remember, your every effort will be rewarded.

Without tracking you’re hoping and praying that you’ll become successful, instead of actually knowing that you’re doing the right things.

Considering the importance of data analyzing, we decided to prepare this step-by-step guide to help you understand your reports and know what data you should look at not only when you start a campaign, but even once you have even more data.

Buckle up.

You should know that there are four aspects that you can optimize in your affiliate marketing campaigns:

1. Traffic

2. Ads/creatives

3. Landing pages

4. Offers

Actually, even the above-mentioned order is meaningful: the right traffic sees the right ad, which sends them to the right lander and ends with conversions from the right offer.

It is evident that if one part is wrong, your machine will suspend its work.

We can spend hours talking about each aspect so this tutorial will take a different approach. We want you to avoid basic mistakes, so we present a procedure for effective affiliate campaign optimization. This will help you to understand and use promptly your tracking data and reports that PeerClick provides to keep your costs down and revenue up.

Of course, this procedure isn’t a dogma, but it is an effective approach to campaign optimization that will be very useful for newbies. But more experienced marketers will also find some valuable tips.

So let’s start.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” Only with proper planning you will be able to react right away because every minute can represent more dollars wasted. Your plan of action means actions including:

· Evaluating and reviewing offers + recording the criteria for different offers

· Checking ad placements from different traffic sources

· Finding out what ad types suit the offer vertical you want to run

· Investigating if this type of offer works best as direct linking or with landing pages.

The check-list above will help you to avoid stupid mistakes and have a clear plan for what you can optimize.

The good news is that the easiest campaign optimizations are on the traffic sources side. Not the bad news, but less pleasant than the previous one, is that not all traffic sources offer the same options so you should check traffic sources options. Yes, some traffic sources let you buy traffic based on device type while others might provide only mobile traffic or only desktop.

It should not be forgotten that you have to set up custom variables on the traffic source side to let it pass the data to PeerClick.

To confirm you don’t blow through your money, you should test your campaign setup. Properly flowing traffic means that it goes from your traffic source through to your landing page and ultimately, offer.

If the first visitor converts that doesn’t mean every visitor will convert. Too stupid to mention this? You won’t believe but some affiliates are too hasty. The result? Right, poor campaign optimization decisions!

You need to make sure that you have enough data to be certain of your conclusion.

And that’s where statistical significance comes in.

Uhh, recall something vaguely about that, yes. High school bearable, math.

In simple terms, if you have a little data which is all very different, that is low-significance, if you have a lot of data that is all closely grouped together, that’s high-significance. In performance marketing, that means that if you have two sets of data, let’s say desktop and mobile, each with over a thousand hits and desktop has a 20% conversion rate, but mobile only has a 1% conversion rate, you’ve got a significant trend that you should take action on.

But if you only had 20 hits, and the difference is 20% and 19% CTR, then it’s not a statistically significant difference yet and you shouldn’t send more traffic.

No one is safe from a bad offer or non-converting landing page. This is the time to check and make sure that you aren’t trying to fix something that’s fundamentally flawed.

· You haven’t set your campaign up correctly (check the error log)

· The offer doesn’t apply to this traffic (for example, the wrong geo or device type)

· Your landing page just isn’t convincing (check the click-through rate and read our guide on landing page optimization)

· The offer just isn’t appealing (look at the conversion rate)

This is due to the possibility that some offers and landing pages may work for certain parts of your traffic, while others may work for other parts.

Analyzing the general performance of a landing page or offer, you may assume these elements not working. But in fact all this may indicate those elements may just have poor performance for certain traffic.

This often happens with landing pages. It happens in practice that one landing page can work well for desktop traffic but doesn’t for mobile. If you get more mobile traffic, it will seem like it is less effective than it really is.

If you are running one offer or landing page and notice that they just aren’t working, it’s time to start over.

Selecting or pausing mobile or desktop traffic is an example of an easy optimization. In step 6 it’s high time to switch to high-level campaign optimization.

Again, traffic source options differ a lot, that’s why it is difficult to say what these high-level actions will be. And that is why step 2 was so important — you should check all the possibilities your traffic source provides.

Some typical campaign optimizations at this point include:

· Device type (desktop/mobile/tablet)

· OS (Windows/Mac/Android/IOS)

· Connection type (Celular/Wifi/Ethernet)

Note: If you are running multiple offers or landing pages, it is worth checking each option against these high-level options.

Some affiliates may decide it’s a good idea to skip high-level optimizations and move immediately to granular optimizations. But that would be a big mistake. At a minimum because it usually takes more time to perform these optimizations, at a maximum — you will be optimizing smaller amounts of traffic meaning it will have less effect.

Some typical campaign optimizations at this point include:

· Different OS versions

· Different Browser

· Different ISPs

· Different connection types

At this point, you can’t pause this traffic so you have one option left. Use rule-based paths to redirect this traffic to a better landing page, offer or a combination of the two.

That’s it! But that’s not all. We have some exciting news.

PeerClick features AI-powered tools that can automatically redistribute your traffic to the best performing offers, landing pages, and paths. So don’t waste time on manual campaigns optimization — let PeerClick AI-powered technology do campaign optimizations for you.