CTR
A ratio of people that have clicked the CTA button on your landing page and the total number of people that have visited your site. This metric basically tells you how successful your landing page is. If many people come to your site but only a few click further, it may be an indicator of a poor landing page. People may leave your page because of several reasons:
They don’t know what to do next. The CTA button is hidden or gives an unclear message.
Your page load time is too long and people don’t want to wait.
Your content or creatives didn’t convince your visitors that the offer you promote is interesting.
Your landing page’s design is not consistent with how your ad and offer present themselves.
Your offer is not attractive at all. This can be judged when analyzed in parallel with conversion rate.
Hot tip: CTR is a great metric to optimize your placements, as it brings results faster. Other metrics, such as ROI or conversion rate require conversions to occur. Good CTR is usually connected with good performance of a given placement.
It’s hard to tell what an average or good CTR should be. That depends on the ad type and the design of the landing page. Complex landing pages with a lot of text and a CTA at the button tend to have lower CTR than simple landing pages that, for example, contain only one video clip and a giant ‘Play’ button.
CV/CR
A ratio of either visits or clicks (depending on if a landing page is present in the campaign funnel) and conversions. It tells you how many people reached your offer vs how many converted.
Conversion rate is usually a good assessment of your offer. A high conversion rate may indicate that your offer is attractive. But you have to remember two things:
High conversion rate does not necessarily equal high earnings.
Low conversion rate is not a definite testimony of a poor-quality offer. It could mean that it simply does not resonate with your audience and tuning your traffic targeting options may help.
To be more precise, let’s describe a conversion rate as a measurement of the attractiveness of your offer for your current audience. If the conversion rate is low, you can change the offer… or the audience.
Hot tip: There’s no better source of knowledge than your customers that actually have converted. If you are the offer owner, you can perform surveys and ask them what made them take your offer and how satisfied they are. Ask questions about your customers’ backgrounds: who they are, where they come from. Use that knowledge to further optimize your traffic targeting options.
CPC/CPV/CPA/CPM/Revshare
Various cost models that help settle costs. So you pay when a visitor:
Clicks your ad – CPC (cost per click)
Sees your ad (in case of CPM – thousand times) – CPV/CPM (cost per view / thousand views)
Converts – CPA (cost per action) or Revshare (a percentage of your payout)
There are several ways you can get cost information: from campaign setup, manual cost update, or integration. Voluum marks the source of cost information with special icons in the ‘Cost’ column.
Regardless of the cost model and source used, you need to pay close attention to how much you spend. The affiliate game is not about just earning, it’s about earning more than spending.
Cost is also the basis of calculating other metrics, such as ROI or revenue. If you are not tracking costs, then why are you tracking at all?
Hot tip: Voluum’s Automizer feature allows you to use rules and take actions on your campaigns in a traffic source and can also synchronize costs between Voluum and an integrated traffic source. This is even for traffic sources that normally don’t even support a standard cost token! Use the Automizer and track costs like a pro.
Payout
This is what you get paid after a successful conversion. Knowing both cost and payout allows Voluum to calculate ROI and revenue.
Payout can be tracked:
automatically, by reading the value passed in the payout token by manually setting an appropriate value in the offer’s setup in Voluum.
Payouts can also differ between various conversion types. For example, you can get one payout for an app install and then a second payout of a different value for an in-app purchase. You can use Custom conversions to differentiate between various conversions.
The last thing worth remembering about payouts is that sometimes you can have subsequent payouts (upsells). So, for example, your customer might buy a complementary filter to their coffee machine you’ve just recommended to them. This would result in double payout. If this may be an option, consider tracking those as well.
ROI
A ratio of money earned vs money invested. Probably the most important financial metric you should use (but definitely not the only one).
A short explanation of this metric: if it’s positive, you are earning money, if it’s zero then you are breaking even, and if it’s negative, then, well, you figure it out.
Like all ratio metrics, it tells you a lot about how well your campaign funnel is optimized, but not exactly if you already are a millionaire. Even if your ROI is 500%, you need to have a decent volume of traffic to have a good amount of earnings.
Unlike the preceding metrics that are usually analyzed on a more general level, ROI can be used to decide on profitability of single placements (or ads, sites, widgets, and so on). Looking at ROI on a more granular level is the first step of the optimization process and the basis for stopping such placements in a traffic source.
Hot tip: You are a busy person, we know. That’s why we’ve developed an AI-powered solution that automatically maximises ROI by determining which lander and offers work best for your campaign.
