Visuals of profits & costs are way more revealing than lists of numbers!
This post will probably be of most use to affiliates just starting out who haven’t yet given much thought to measuring their success!
Even if you have a very small affiliate business it’s really important to make sure you know exactly how it’s progressing. I’ve found a few simple Excel spreadsheets to be invaluable in charting the progress of my business and planning how to move forward.
I decided to make available for anyone who wants to use them 3 spreadsheets (with graphs) that are altered versions of the ones I use to keep an eye on things. Here’s a list of what they keep tabs on, I’ve populated them all with mock figures so you can see how they chart things.
1. Monthly Sales
This spreadsheet tots up: -
- Income from each network.
- Expenses.
- Expenses as a percentage of turnover so you can keep an eye on your margins.
- Breaks results down into average daily profit ( I like to know how much I earn a day!)
The spreadsheet outputs the turnover, profit, and spend into a nice graph so you can see business progress at a glance.
I’ve found it useful for seeing the seasonal trends in my business and planning to iron them out with other revenue streams, charting the ebb and flow of income with different networks, to plan / forecast annual growth, and just downright reassuring when I’m unsure exactly how things are going.
2.Profit Targets
Just a simple spreadsheet featuring: -
- Target V’s actual profit (with graph).
- Percentage above / below target.
- Tot up of progress, average monthly profit, projected profit & target v’s projected increase for the year.
Good to keep an eye on progress, and also good to stop yourself moving the goalposts mid year. I like to sit down and work out what I’m happy with over the next 12 months. Once its in the spreadsheet it’s set in stone!
Individual Site Profits
For monitoring the progress of individual sites. This looks at: -
- Turnover broken down into individual merchants.
- Expenses.
- Monthly profit (and that average per day metric again!)
- Percentage of marketing spend of turnover (again to keep an eye on those margins)
- Monthly traffic.
- EPC per visitor to site.
- Visits through to merchant / CTR.
This one is probably the most useful of all. It’s really incredibly important to monitor which sites are contributing good profits and keep an eye on the ones that aren’t. I find that working out my CTR is really important – it lets me see any issues and address them quickly. Also, the site EPC is a fantastic metric. I use it to motivate myself and also to forecast how much I can increase my earnings by going out and finding similar traffic. I usually know how much work it is to put out X pages that bring in £xxx, so this is a great way to plan and effectively move forward to increase that cashflow.
I hope these help and if you have any questions on them please post below. No doubt I’ll have left some silly bit of Kirsty-esque maths in them that make sense to nobody but me. What can I say? I’m unique!
Contains all 3 spreadsheets. Right Click & Save Target As should get you a copy.
July 30th, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Nice one Kirsty, I don’t really monitor my sites individually so this will be a very useful way to start!
July 30th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
What a life saver! thanks very much Kirsty. On a day when I am going through all my stats, costs etc and have not kept any record of what’s going on this post was perfect timing.
July 30th, 2010 at 6:06 pm
Awesome post Kirsty I think this is lacking in quite alot of affiliate newbies plans!
July 30th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
Hey guys… I’m glad people are finding it useful. I do enjoy updating my spreadsheets. It makes me feel much more in control of what’s going on!
August 2nd, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Thanks Kirsty, great stuff as usual. I’d also recommend tracking the earnings per outbound affiliate click, so you can get an idea of whether your visitors are going on to buy big ticket items…
August 2nd, 2010 at 11:13 pm
Thanks Graham, is that something you do?? Is it tracked generally or at the click level??
Always interested to find out more on tracking and metrics. I loves my stats
August 3rd, 2010 at 9:52 am
Not as detailed as you suggest – we just divide the profit by the outbound clicks, it gives us an idea of the value of what’s being bought and how well sites are converting. I’d love to do it at a more detailed level, but I’d spend all day typing figures into spreadsheets…
I love my stats too – I’ve tracked every penny we’ve earned via the networks since June 2001!
August 3rd, 2010 at 10:46 am
Good idea Graham. It wouldn’t be hard to add that EPC to my spreadsheets. I have some where I record clicks through to merchant and others I don’t (typical woman – all inconsistent!!)
There was one case recently where if I’d have been doing that I’d have realised my bounce rates on a site were very high because traffic to some very low quality landing pages had jumped. Doh.
August 3rd, 2010 at 11:08 am
Have you got affmeter? I use it alongside my spreadsheets, it’s great for spotting superstar sites or detecting duds. It records every click every day to every merchant, so can be a bit of a beast once you’ve got a lot of data in it.
August 14th, 2010 at 10:44 am
Thanks Kirsty for sharing your spreadsheets; it’s always good to see how the ‘supers’ do things. I created my own spreadsheets a while ago but i’ve been quite lazy about completing them. I found it quite time consuming logging into each network, then finding the required data for each and every merchant. I can see why so many people use Affmeter
August 19th, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Thanks Kirsty! Just made a small improvement which saves you from having to manually input the number of days in the month.
In cell B16 change:
=SUM(B15/30)
into:
=SUM(B15/(DAY(DATE(YEAR(B1),MONTH(B1)+1,1)-1)))
Then drag across to apply it to the rest of the cells.
Hope this helps!
Ken
August 20th, 2010 at 3:26 am
Ken, that’s absolutely bloody brilliant thanks so much. I’m not that skilled at Excel formulas so that will be very handy!
November 19th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
Thanks for a great post Kirsty, there are some really interesting ideas here. I had a lot of trouble tracking affiliate statistics for a long time at my company Fubra Limited. We then decided that, as it was such an important part of affiliate marketing, we would create our own online system to do it for us. We are about to launch AffJet next week. It would be great if you would give it a go while it’s in beta mode. It currently offers you the ability to do most of the things you have listed in your post but there are a few things missing such as the targets (which are planned for the next version.)
Anyway, thanks for a great post, hopefully AffJet can save you some time by cutting out the manual inputting of data.
Jen