Affiliate Marketing Blog: Crutial Data To Track For Large Sites

I was doing a post about how to decide on what information to take on board as a new affiliate, but as the content below began to grow, I decided to leave that bit until Monday and extend this bit - what data should you track?

Back in 2007 I had a post that was featured in the search cap of the day on the Search Engine Land site. That wasn't my intention, but my post "Google Analytics Please Give Me For Christmas" was aimed at trying to get more useful information for affiliates and SEO's. Now, obviously Analytics has improved immensely, and Google Webmaster Tools has become a source of essential information, but I still feel site owners should do a fair bit of their own leg-work.

For many of my client sites I track a number of non-obvious KPI's that will help you gauge the impact of any changes that you'll make after reading "hints" and "tips" from affiliate or SEO blogs and forums.

* Obviously track the total number of pages indexed in each section. Also keep track of the total number of pages present in each section, which will allow you to do the next one.

* Track the total number of pages in a given section against the total number present in Google's database (site:www.sitename.com/section/ or site:sitename.com/ "unique text") - this shows you the level of indexation - your goal should be to try and increase this ratio. (Be careful to track actual pages indexed and not just the links to those pages being indexed)

* Another element to track is the total number of pages in that section against the landing pages to that section (for the site as a whole data you'll need to track total search engine traffic). This will show the effectiveness of the changes that you make. The chart below gives an example of what it could look like (with fictitious data)

Obviously there's no ratio to aim for - its the change in the ratio that counts. You could set yourself targets, but remember, if the total ratio is going up, you may have a certain sub-section doing well, but other pages may be declining. This could be the case if all the pages within that section aren't linked to equally.

* Track the relative performance of "intent keywords" which you should be building into your site's structure. Choose keywords such as "best", "buy", "cheap", "cheapest" etc then make sure you create reports that show you the performance of those keywords. If you start to target specific keywords then make sure you track visits from key phrases that include those keywords.

- * From that look at which pages get traffic from those keyphrases and then look at the other keyphrases that deliver traffic to that page and then consider tracking some of those keyphrase stems.

* If you can, track the ratio of users that use your search service when they actually found your site from a non-brand search phrase. This may indicate that Google isn't delivering the user to the most relevant page and would suggest that you should re-optimise that phrase or extend your content to cover it.

Obviously you should add other KPI's such as:

* Ratio of non-paid search traffic to referral traffic (and the net figures)

* Ratio of brand to non-brand related searches - your brand, of course.

* And a whole host of goal/sale orientated KPI's - but that's for another post.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is, look beyond visits and the how much you're getting from Google. There's stuff under the hood that you need to know about and track whilst you're listening to information on the 'net and modifying your site following guidance from "gurus".

But whatever you do, keep a change-log, if you're tweaking so you can match your "improvements" to site indexation and traffic - and don't be afraid to un-do stuff.

As a parting note, make sure you're aware that different changes you make will take varying lengths of time to be reflected in the search engine databases.