Affiliate Tracking and Attribution: How to Measure Affiliate Marketing Performance

Clicks

Number of clicks tells you how many users were clicking on your affiliate link. The clicks are a good metric but that is only the beginning. Many clicks with no sales normally suggest some problem either with the audience, offer, or the landing page.

Conversions

Conversion here is the action that matters to you. It might be a purchase, subscription, free trial, form submission etc. Determine what conversion is right for you and monitor it on every affiliate you work with.

Conversion rate

This is a ratio of conversions to clicks. So, for example, if there were 1,000 clicks and 30 purchases, your conversion rate is 3%. Monitor the conversion rates of all your affiliates to see which one performs better than others.

Revenue

How much money you generated thanks to your affiliates? This is the total amount but also monitor the revenue generated by each affiliate and revenue per click.

CPA

Cost per acquisition is the amount of money it takes to get one user from the affiliate program. This includes commissions and fees. If your CPA is higher than the worth of the customer you get, there is a problem no matter how active your dashboards are.

ROI

It stands for return on investment and answers the most important question of all – how well does your money work for you. One easy way to calculate this metric is (revenue minus total cost) divided by total cost. Keep it on hand always.