Most of the affiliates who make their first attempts in this crazy business are left with a question:
“Do I need an ad tracker to track key metrics from my affiliate campaigns?”
This is why I decided to write this article and give you not one, three, or five, but ten reasons why investing in an ad tracking solution is the way to go.
Buckle up.
1. Know EVERYTHING About Your Performance
If you’re not tracking your campaigns, you’re losing time and money.
That’s harsh but true. Unfortunately, nothing will help you if you lack data.
Knowledge from the Web, insights gathered on affiliate forums and an unerring gut feeling are all great, but they won’t be enough to make a living as an affiliate. If you want to succeed you need to track every parameter of your campaign: offers, creatives, referrer links, carriers, browser versions, device models and so on.
Every single event matters as without data you can only make inaccurate decisions and inaccurate decisions result in wasted budget and frustrated mind.
An affiliate tracker gives you the possibility to know everything about your campaigns:
- if they’re profitable,
- how many conversions they are generating,
- and where your visitors come from.
As you can easily track both organic and paid traffic, record every event, click, and conversion, you get better control over your traffic flow. All that allows you to make data-driven decisions and optimize your efforts for a higher ROI.
2. Manage All Your Campaigns in One Place
When you’re starting out, you might want to focus on mastering a single traffic source type. But as you grow, you buy more and more diversified traffic. Especially, if you find something that works, you want to copy and paste it on numerous sources, before anyone else. And that’s when the tricky part starts.
Working simultaneously on various platforms is really hard, time-consuming and inefficient. You need to work on scattered data across numerous sources. To get any valuable conclusions you need to go through overwhelming amounts of data and spend lots of time on often ineffective performance analysis via spreadsheets.
Why not save yourself time and effort and keep all your campaigns in one place?
With an affiliate tracker, you can manage and optimize your performance painlessly. As you aggregate every piece of data from every campaign and every traffic source on one platform, you get the whole picture of your performance and are able to easily uncover areas that need your attention or improvement.
3. Use Automation to Skip Exhaustive Manual Work
Once you’ve got a few campaigns up and running, you focus on improving your ad performance and optimizing your campaigns. And that’s when repetitive manual work comes in. Lots of manual work.
When you optimize your campaigns, there are always multiple variables to test. Squeezing profits out of a campaign by adjusting bids, refining targets, and launching split tests make the process really time-consuming. And it’s not over. Once you implement the changes, you need to monitor the results – all day, every day.
It sounds a bit scary, but what if I told you that a large part of that work can be taken care of and managed more efficiently than any human ever could, including you?
The most advanced ad tracking software features AI-powered tools that can automatically redistribute your traffc to the best performing offers, landing pages, and paths. You can put your traffic distribution on autopilot and watch your profits grow. On top of that, you can turn on mobile and desktop notifications to get alerts when your performance suddenly changes.
All in all, an affiliate tracker will not only help save you time on manual work, but also prevent your ROI from dropping, and maximize your ad spend.
4. Target Your Ads More Effectively
Targeting is one of the trickiest, yet important, concepts in our business. Addressing your ads to the right audience is critical if you want to maximize your conversion rates.
Unfortunately, targeting at the traffic source level is often limited. As a result, you might end up wasting impressions (and possible earnings) on irrelevant audiences. Again, ad tracking software comes to the rescue.
An affiliate tracker gives you everything you need to know about your visitors, from the referrer and mobile carrier to device model, operating system, browser and much more. Knowing which creatives, geos, referrers, carriers and browsers versions and more brings you the highest conversion rates.
Target only relevant audiences so you can increase the appeal of your message, ultimately lowering costs and maximizing your budget.
5. Get Actionable Insights on Your Performance
Accessing data is only the beginning. To make profitable decisions you need to discover the right angles, spot the latest trends, and uncover pockets of profits. As the number of your campaigns increases, so do the volumes of data to process. Converting a bottomless ocean of information into valuable conclusions becomes a real challenge.
With an affiliate tracker, your life is a bit easier as you are able to turn your data into actionable insights. Tracking software enables decision making based on real-time data, which significantly reduces the risk of low performance and high costs. You can group your data hasslefree and drill down into your reports to extract the most important information.
6. Test Campaigns for Best Results Easier
Anything a visitor does on your landing page provides you with valuable information. You can use this data to come up with hypotheses about the best converting variants, split test them, and determine the most effective approach.
Basically, every time you start a campaign in a new geo, try a different angle, a fresh landing page, an improved creative set or any other variable, you should dedicate a part of your budget just for testing. How can you do it in the most effective manner?
Identifying what your visitors want and what they respond is the real secret to making big money in affiliate marketing.
Use your ad tracking software to get to know what resonates with your audience faster. Easily determine which of your campaign paths perform better for given conversion goals. Rotate your landing pages and offers on a path or campaign level. Carry out A/B tests automatically and find out where to make changes for improved effectiveness.
7. Get Full Support Anytime You Need It
Being an affiliate is like entrepreneurship: you’re a ship captain, who’s constantly striving to save it from being wrecked. You make all the decisions, and you are the one responsible. If you buy non-performing traffic or bet on the wrong offer, the burned-out budget will be yours to fix.
Troubleshooting alone and relying solely on the information found on the Internet is really hard.
This is why access to customer support and account management can be priceless. You can always get help with any issue you might face: campaign setup, optimization, scaling.
The best affiliate trackers give you is the full support throughout your affiliate journey: personal onboarding, live webinars, knowledge-base articles, video tutorials, and much more. All that to deliver actionable insights and a possibility to maximize the ad performance.
8. Access Your Campaigns On Your Mobile
Affiliate marketing is 24/7. To keep track of your performance you need to spend countless hours in front of your reports. An offer stopped converting? Bots dominating your traffic? You need to be able to react right away because every minute can represent more dollars wasted.
Luckily, we found a way to skip the “always be in front of your monitor” part.
In Voluum, you can track your campaigns on the go and access your reports wherever and whenever you like using Voluum Mobile App. Keep all your relevant data at hand to stay up to date with your campaigns. Get mobile push notifications if your performance changes, and react instantly.
9. Stop Wasting Money on Bot Traffic
Advertisers waste $51 M due to Ad Fraud every single day. This means that during the 365 days in 2018 over $ 18 B was lost to fraudulent activities.
Fraudsters might be using various techniques to burn budgets and payouts, but still, most cases are connected with bot traffic. Bots account for almost more than half of all web traffic and can negatively impact your metrics leading to wasted money, time, and effort. What’s more, bots make it extremely difficult to understand the effectiveness of your campaigns and can harm your relationship with offer owners.
As this is one of the biggest problems affiliates face these days, we decided to create an anti-fraud solution inside our Voluum tracker.
Protect your performance and reputation from bots and invalid traffic. Detect suspicious clicks and visits, block non-human traffic and get proof for a refund from your traffic source. All that inside your tracker. For real.
10. Keep Your Costs Low as You Grow
Your campaign is a success? Go for broader audiences! Once you find a profitable campaign, you do everything to scale it as much and fast as you can. Copy cats don’t waste time and nor should you. But before you hit the high numbers, you need to make sure that you can handle big volumes. And that’s what any reliable cloud-hosted tracker can do.
Voluum tracks approximately 25 bn events per month, so you can be sure we can handle any volumes (it’s in the name). Multiple data centers across five continents ensure no click loss. Our servers have been up non-stop since 2015, so every piece of your campaign data is safe with us.
To sum up…
This business is not simple, but your decision should be. If you want to hit the affiliate jackpot? Bet on tracking.
💸Say “no” to wasting time and burning budgets 💸
Sign up to Voluum today!
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