Statistics Are Like A Bikini. What They Reveal Is Suggestive, But What They Conceal is Vital
posted in Affiliate Marketing |
“Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”
The above was a nice little proverb my friend my friend (so good I named him twice) Shane told me, whom I am still waiting to launch his blog which I am sure will be quite humourous.
Earlier this week I was chatting about the thought with a couple of networks and this morning read the latest blog entry from Monetise This … Tell Me The Referring URL When I Get A Sale .
He is absolutely spot on when he says “there’s one thing that I’d always like to know: what was the referring page that caused that sale.” This of course gives you an insight into what webpages are working for you & which paid search keyword phrases are creating sales. “It could help us affiliates concentrate on the pages that DONT generate income, and leave those that do, to sit there on their own.” – Frostie
Hence … What they reveal is suggestive
Now, a few networks do have this information like Webgains & Paidonresults for example, some of it requires a little more drilling down within the navigation like say Buy.at or Tradedoubler.
However, and this cannot be done simply by elimination when you have a lot of webpages created or doing considerable paid search.
What we maybe forgetting is the referring url & search string & keywords for those clicks that DON’T generate a sale, for which I would like to know for every click where I don ‘t make a sale & have access to a simple spreadsheet I can download pertaining to each merchant, over whatever date range. This would allow me to amend non performing pages, by adjusting the content or merchants appearing on that page to be more profitable. With reference to paid search, most decent ppc’ers have a fair amount of negative keywords in their campaigns, but you never think of all of them, this would then help in creating additional lists of negative dodo phrases or deleting those which create a positive ROI… simply by looking at this data of non performing clicks.
Thus increasing CTR & conversion & consequently ROI … blah blah .. But saving money by trimming the excess fat is just important as those which actaully generated sales.
Hence … “what they conceal is vital.”
Thus …
“Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”
What statistics conceal can lend itself to so many things within affiliate marketing & hopefully some networks will move forward on this.
