Reliable data has become one of the greatest competitive advantages digital marketers can have. To develop it, you need 2 things: choose a really good ad tracker and know how to analyze the ad data it consolidates. As practice shows, the last point is the most tricky and the most important one.
No support team will be able to dive into your business and help you analyze the data to maximize your overall profit. We asked our partners and friends from RedTrack.io — ad tracking and conversion attribution platform to share their insights. Together we summed up 5 most common mistakes affiliates make while working with their data. What are they?
#1 Focusing on the wrong metrics or too many metrics
Today, good ad trackers offer a wide range of capabilities. You can have all the needed information about clicks, impressions, conversions, ROI, profits, and dozens of other metrics with varying degrees of accuracy.
RedTrack collects 30+ data points about every event and consolidates them into accurate and simple reports.
Do you really need all these 30+ metrics? Too many of them can easily confuse you. Write down which metrics are the most important for your advertising campaigns and customize your reporting dashboards to fit your needs.
Detailed picture of ad campaigns. Source redtrack.io
Inside RedTrack you can add, hide, and reorder all the available columns and metrics and analyze the dynamics of your traffic effectiveness through an adequate period of time. If you regularly work with several Traffic Sources, niches and targeting options, you most likely will need to customize your dashboards every time you switch between them. No need to do it. Just save the report template and reuse it every time you start out a new advertising campaign.
#2 Spending too much time on ineffective actions
This problem equally concerns both experienced affiliates and those who only start their journey in the world of digital marketing.
As to newcomers, they tend to make hasty actions, and rush between two lights. Is this the right time to change strategy or should I wait a little longer? Being on emotions and not taking their eyes off the monitor, they can make wrong estimations and lose a lot of money.
Experienced digital marketers are more calm and reasonable, but often spend too much of their precious time on campaign settings, monitoring, switching from one tab to another. All these routine tasks have a little effect on their revenue.
Good news is that all these issues can be easily solved with some automated mechanisms. With RedTrack, you can set auto-rules, and these 24/7 rules will track the campaign performance and pause sending traffic in case it shows poor results. All you have to do is to set KPIs for your campaign/ lander/ offer/ ad placement. RedTrack now fully integrated more than 20 Traffic sources via API, so no more switching between platforms, you can auto-stop traffic from RedTrack interface.
#3 Don’t take into account bot traffic
Most tracking and analytical tools don’t automatically exclude bot traffic from the stats. Looking at the growing Traffic chart in your Google Analytics account, you may not even imagine what part of the growth was due to bot traffic.
There are two types of bots that exist on the Internet: good bots ( the ones that don’t do any harm to your ad campaigns, these are Google, FB bots, etc.) and the bad ones – malicious technologies, spiders, crawlers, spy tools, scams that eat your ad budget and attack your website. One of the studies showed affiliate fraud can affect between 20% to 60% of an advertiser’s total conversions. Looks not so attractive, doesn’t it?
RedTrack offers two separate solutions that detect both types of bot traffic. As to good bots, their mechanisms can automatically exclude the activity of 16 well-known bots from users stats, keeping the raw information in the logs. As to bad bots — thanks to advanced FraudScore bot detection technology integrated in RedTrack — you get the broad picture of your traffic, using 20+ metrics to demonstrate where you lose money.
# 4 Believing in one truly effective bundle and campaigns settings
Digital advertising industry is an unpredictable niche as the trends and winning combinations are changing with the speed of light. Some even question the effectiveness of spy tools — what worked yesterday doesn’t have to work today. This is a simple truth which many affiliates forget as soon as they managed to launch successful ad campaigns.
As practice shows, there’s only one reliable way to check if your hypothesis are really true — A/B testing. A simple button color change can seriously affect the activity of the target audience and your financial success. You can rotate offers assigned to one landing page and run several of them simultaneously. Take a look on how RedTrack clients learned to use A/B testing and significantly improved their performance.
# 5 Using unreliable tracking methods
Some digital advertisers still rely on Javascript code and 3-party cookies based Pixels, embedding them on their ‘thank you’ pages. While even today it causes additional inconveniences for digital managers due to their inaccuracies and mismatch with some browsers and regulators requirements, these methods won’t be acceptable soon at all. Is there a way out? Actually, there’s! Today the most reliable and secure way to track users’ data across the web is to use the S2S Postback tracking method.
In this case, the tracking is done server-side, so there is much less randomness and inaccuracies in results. Users can’t affect the stats by deleting cookies or turning ad blockers on, and importantly, it’s much less troubled with fraud.
