As An affiliate the Benefits Of Using Google Analytics

As an aggressive affiliate marketer Google analytics can give you a precise picture of where you’re coming from, where you presently are and where you are heading to.


Affiliate marketing on the Internet is an ongoing activity.  You are always racing with your competitors in order to get more targeted traffic.  


The problem is not with traffic; the problem is that there are thousands of affiliate marketers competing with you from all over the globe and in order to beat them you need to know what they don’t know.  


This is where Google analytics can help you.

Data that paints the real picture

For an affiliate marketer data is everything.  It tells you

• Precisely where you are getting traffic from
• What are the keywords being used when people come to your website
• How many among these people actually convert
• What are the pages that draw most of the traffic
• What are the websites that send you most of the traffic
• What pages distract or turn people off and send them away from your website
• How much time people spend on your website exploring various options
• What paths your visitors normally follow when they are exploring your website
• What geographic regions they mostly come from

Besides these details you may also find a plethora of Google analytics data that may help you tweak individual pages and increase the inflow of targeted traffic to your website.And it is not just data

Google analytics also allows you to set goals

Setting goals in Google analytics means instructing the program to track certain behavior of your visitors.  


Suppose you want them to click on a particular affiliate link.  You can submit that link to the goal-setting section and from then onwards Google analytics will keep track of all your visitors who click that link.  


You can also use AdWords links in order to set and measure goals.

Google analytics is totally free

Well, there are particular sections organizations, people and companies have to pay for, but all the features mentioned above come free to you and if you use Gmail you can already use Google analytics.

How do you benefit from Google analytics as an affiliate?

Your success as an affiliate marketer depends upon

• Getting tons of traffic
• Getting targeted traffic

You must know what keywords attract the most traffic.  But you mustn’t be optimizing your website for the keywords that attract massive amounts of traffic; you must focus on keywords that actually convert your visitors into customers and clients.  


For these you have to track the performance of links that really matter and Google analytics allow you to do that as an affiliate marketer.  


It allows you to pinpoint exactly where is the problem and how you can solve the problem.  


For instance there is a particular keyword that isn’t performing well.  


Google analytics can show you what percentage of traffic it is able to attract. 


If that percentage is quite low you can start building content around that keyword in order to improve your rankings.  


You can follow this method with every keyword that is under-performing.


Google analytics also tells you whether most of your affiliate traffic comes from other websites or search engines.  


So if you notice that you aren’t getting much traffic from search engines you can pump up your optimization efforts.  


On the other hand if you observe you are getting very little traffic from other websites, you can contact the publishers and sort out the issue.


If you are investing money on Google AdWords Google analytics allows you to track the performance of your individual AdWords campaigns and this way you can lower your costs and increase your conversion rate.


Basically, online affiliate marketing is all about doing the right thing at the right time, and Google analytics allows you to do exactly that.