How to measure the success of your affiliate programs

Your statistics table provides you with very important information: how many impressions your ad received and how many clicks those ads generated. It divides clicks into impressions to tell you your clickthrough rate — the percentage of people who see the ad and click on it. The number of impressions your ads receive depends on the marketing of your site. The number of clicks the ads receive will depend on a whole load of other factors, including:

• How closely does the subject of the ad match your content?
• Where is the ad unit placed on the page?
• How well is it optimized?
• And even the type of users who visit your site (targeting)

Much of your job will always be to get all of these factors right to push your clickthrough rate up as high as possible.

After the clickthrough rate comes your most important piece of information: the amount you’ve actually earned.

The eCPC and eCPM can be a bit confusing. The eCPC is the amount of money you are “effectively” earning per click, and the eCPM is the amount that you are earning on average for every thousand impressions.

Since  Shopzilla’s affiliate program does not necessarily give you money every time someone clicks on one of your ads, you might think it’s difficult to compare it against other advertising programs, but actually it isn’t: AdSense reports, for example, will tell you also exactly how much you’re earning for each click on an ad unit. That’s when eCPC and your eCPM stats come to play:  those two values will enable you to weigh Shopzilla Publisher against other affiliate programs (regardless of whether it is CPC, CPA, CPM, etc), in this example compare it to AdSense.

It’s only when you’re able to compare like for like that you’ll know what to do. Shopzilla’s provision of the equivalent earnings in CPC and CPM rates make those comparisons much easier!

Read more about earning reports in our affiliate program.

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