Affiliate Marketing KPIs: What to Focus on and What to Ignore

Robert M Kilonzo
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read

Affiliate marketers will agree that KPIs (key performance indicators) are essential in determining the success of an affiliate campaign. Without it, you will also have no way of telling if a program has a high chance of succeeding.

How to Use KPIs

You can use KPIs in two ways: to determine a program’s profitability for marketers and to optimize your program for managers.

For marketers, they need to focus on certain KPIs that indicate profitability. These KPIs are year-over-year growth, percentage of new affiliates and the likes. Some KPIs are misleading. Some people think that KPIs like conversion rate is important. But that is not the case. You’ll find out more about this below.

For affiliate managers, you can choose the KPIs that indicate profitability and optimize that. However, optimization methods can only do so much. Your program should be profitable to begin with if you want to have a better KPI portfolio.

Why Use KPIs

You need KPIs to know if a program is worth promoting. As an affiliate marketer, your time is limited. People cannot expect you to write content, promote on social media, do SEO and write press releases at the same time. With this, you need to focus their energy on programs that will give you the highest return for your time spent.

Fortunately, KPIs allow you to breakdown certain affiliate marketing platforms and methods into variables. With this, you’ll be able to see the relationship between the variables. You will then clearly see if one variable causes another or if one variable affects the other.

How can this help you in the long run? Well, it’s simple.

KPIs will help you determine if an affiliate program is worth promoting. Promoting affiliate programs is not cheap. With affiliate programs having the 3rd largest marketing budget behind PPC and email, it is therefore important to allocate your resources well. In fact, the US affiliate marketing spend has reach as much as $4 billion in 2016 and this is expected to increase at a rate of 17% in the coming years. This goes to show how serious affiliate marketers are in promoting products and services.

Since KPIs can have an impact on budget and profits, a careful study must be done. After all, not all KPIs are important. Some affiliate marketers can be overly obsessed with these indicators that they miss the entire picture. Indicators like conversion rate and earnings per click are not important. Instead, you need to focus on the factors that affects revenue.

Today, I am going to show you the KPIs that you should ignore and the KPIs that you should focus on. Hopefully, this will help you in choosing the right affiliate programs to promote.

KPIs You Must Ignore

Let’s start with the KPIs you must ignore. These KPIs are often found in affiliate directories but they offer no indication of an affiliate program’s success.

Number of affiliates.

An affiliate program may have millions of affiliates but that doesn’t mean that it is making a lot of money.

Note: This article was originally published on the OSI Affiliate Blog. To see the whole article you can go here http://www.osiaffiliate.com/blog/affiliate-marketing-kpi.

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Robert M Kilonzo

Written by

osi affiliate software, ecommerce marketing podcast, running with the horses

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