As a canny entrepreneur, you’ll want to monitor all aspects of your business. On the Internet, that comes down to tracking data, all kinds of it.

Remember, an affiliate is really an Internet marketer and successful marketers of all persuasions love data. Marketers burn to know who their customers are, where they heard about the company, what makes them come back, what makes them buy. One of the key differences between Internet marketing and the bricks-and-mortar kind is the amount of actionable data the Net can provide.

Keeping track of all that information can seem overwhelming. When she launched bargain shopping site DealHunting.com in 2000, Maggie Boone spent 16 hours a day trying to keep up with stores, products and coupons Ð for a grand total of $2,000 a month. “It’s really hard and very time-consuming,” Boone said. “If anyone thinks it’s easy, well, it’s the opposite.” That careful tracking paid off. Three years later, although she still puts in the hours, Boone has four full-time employees and an income that lets the family live comfortably without her having to work outside the home. She has enough profits salted away that her husband can retire whenever he wants to.

Get ready to become a data hound. If you want to be as successful as Maggie Boone, you’ll need to keep track of four different areas: sales; merchants and their offerings; traffic to, from and within your site; and your advertising and marketing.

How deeply you have to get into tracking data depends on what kind of site you have and how many programs you run. To offer one example, Rotten Tomatoes is a site for film buffs, packed with movie reviews, news and gossip. Visitors can buy DVDs, posters and games. Because the site is so targeted, Rotten Tomatoes works directly with just a handful of merchants. “A lot of these groups have their own ways of tracking,” Rotten Tomatoes CEO Patrick Lee said. “We can either log in to see them, or they send us reports.” Lee trusts the reports, although he might check how many clicks the site is sending over to a merchant, to make sure the numbers make sense.

Compare that simple approach with CouponMountain, a site that strives to help people “live a little above their means” by getting discounts on all sorts of stuff. Founded in 2001 as an after-work hobby by Talmadge O’Neill and Harry Tsao, it now draws 1 million unique visitors every month and reports that it sends more than $100 million in sales each year to approximately 500 merchant partners. CouponMountain, which now has a staff of 11, employs a mix of third-party services and homegrown software applications to keep close track of merchants, referrals, coupon expirations and advertising. The company has one person dedicated to checking merchant reports each day, using AffTrack, an Internet-based service that aggregates reports from networks and individual merchants.

The bottom line

Sales are, of course, top-of-mind for affiliates, because they’re the main influence on the bottom line. Each merchant program may have a different basis for commissions: One might pay for clicks through to its site, another for site registration, and another for sales of products.

Affiliate networks and individual merchants offer other Web-based reports where their partners can check sales and revenue. Reports may be real-time or updated daily or weekly. While many affiliates like to check their reports once a day, most wait at least a month or two to drop under-performing programs. Tracking of sales and commissions happens automatically and reliably, according to Chris Henger, vice president of sales and marketing for affiliate marketing company Performics, because each affiliate’s traffic comes to the merchant via a unique link. “Affiliates don’t have to monitor whether tracking is working,” Henger said. “[There are typically more issues] around, ‘What sales volume am I getting from this merchant, and how do I improve that?'”

Successful affiliates focus not on gross revenues, but on earnings-per-click, or EPC. (See the sidebar “ABCs of EPCs.”) “The most important metric you can get from any network or software is the EPC,” said Shawn Collins, director of affiliate marketing for resource site ClubMom. For example, someone might send a thousand clicks to a bookseller and only 120 clicks to a clothing store, each of which pay the same commission. If you looked only at the commission, you might assume the two programs were equally lucrative. You’d be wrong.

“They don’t pay attention to the fact that it took a lot less traffic to make that same amount of money from one of the merchants,” Collins said. “They don’t take the time to crunch the numbers to see what they actually earn. They’re just stupefied by the [gross] numbers.”

Tracking EPC can help you put your efforts into programs that return the most profit for the least amount of effort. Some network reporting tools and third-party software can automatically calculate and compare EPCs from a variety of programs. Some can also let affiliates create custom reports that compare merchants and programs in different ways so they can identify trends or compare conversion ratios. DealHunting and ClubMom use tracking and analysis tools from AffTrack. There are a lot of reporting options that people don’t take advantage of, according to Collins. Those who don’t, he said, “don’t see the real story.”

Merchant-dizing

When it comes to keeping an eye on all the different merchants, offers and promotions, top-producing affiliates can expect personal service from affiliate managers with the networks and merchants. For a smaller fry, it’s more self-serve. Boone said most of her time is spent on this aspect of her business. “We get a lot of our sales info from the customer channel,” she said. “A handful of merchants keeps us really informed; the rest we deal with as a customer to know what’s going on. We subscribe to the email newsletters that go to their customers, and we literally get hundreds of emails a day from different merchants with sales and bargains.”

Boone turned to a programmer friend to create a database of stores that automatically tracks coupon codes and deletes them as they expire. She can query the database to find out, for example, which stores don’t have any current offers. CouponMountain also built its own tool to track coupon expirations. And it has a content team that spends its days checking to make sure that offers are still good.

Aside from keeping an eye on expiring offers, affiliates have no control over their visitors’ experiences when they arrive on merchant sites. The more you make clear your role as a referrer, the less likely your visitors will blame you if things go wrong with a merchant. Working with trusted partners can ease your mind. Networks protect you by vetting merchants, and they’ll pull the plug on deadbeats. When dealing with established retailers, you can rely on their reputations to some extent. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore less established brands. “There are always different new companies,” said Collins of ClubMom. “I’ll go to different message boards and ask around, ask who’s considered to be the most trustworthy vendor of a product.” Collins warned that you should take such advice with some caution, however. “There’s always a risk that a competitor might try to send you to a bad company. People are helpful and friendly, but they have their competitive interests.”

Still, it’s wise not to take remove yourself too far from consumer-merchant relations. Daniel Washburn, director of merchant development at CouponMountain, says consumer feedback is an important part of his business. “I’m in contact with merchants on a daily basis,” Washburn said. “But in an online business, customers aren’t walking in your front door. So having some sort of communication with them is very important in building a successful site.”

Every time a visitor requests a coupon from CouponMountain, a popup box asks, “Did this coupon work?” There are many places on the site that request feedback

, and the company gets as many as 50 customer emails a day. These are not just complaints but also requests for particular coupons or items. But don’t ask for feedback unless you’re willing to respond within two days, the industry standard for good customer service. Wait any longer, and your customers will get impatient and either contact you again with more irritation or go elsewhere to find out what they want.

Positive attributes

Tracking offers and merchants is just the beginning. You can go deeper. Consumers on the Internet are often searching for product information to help them make choices. You need to understand why they make the choices they do on your site, so that you can encourage them to make choices that lead to sales. At the same time, as in the real world, not all shopping choices are based on objective considerations. Merchandising and presentation play a big part in decisions. Therefore, you should carefully track what Lisa Riolo, vice president of client development for affiliate network Commission Junction, calls “attributes.”

Offer attributes may be actual features of the product. To use credit card offers as an example, the product attributes include the introductory APR and annual fee. If you ran a financial information site, analyzing the attributes of your best-performing credit card offers might show you that your audience preferred cards with no annual fee, Riolo said.

How products are described and displayed are also attributes. A retailer might offer several different photos of the same product, in different sizes, with and without backgrounds, from different angles. If you keep track of which photos or descriptions you use, you can understand what works best with your unique site.

Traffic jamming

Another element to come to grips with is internal traffic: how do visitors move through your site? Large corporate Web publishers use complex applications to track visitors’ movements. Many affiliate networks let you put extra information into your links so that you can see which pages do the best job of getting visitors to click. This information lets you move ads and links to the pages visitors like and delete pages of no interest.

Tracking the comings and goings of Web visitors is as important as monitoring revenue. After all, it’s the traffic that makes you money. Check your ads, including banners, link exchanges and paid search results, to see what it is that drew people to your site.

Playing the search keyword game is an art and science unto itself, and many affiliates devote the majority of their time to scrutinizing and massaging their word lists. Search engines Google and Overture have tools that let advertisers observe how their paid search advertising performs. Some networks have management tools that let you incorporate paid search advertisements into your analysis of your overall activity within the network. Some site-building or management applications will let you compare results across search engines and networks.

When you’re ready to become more sophisticated, look for software tools that let you map everything we’ve discussed. “You may want to track all the events that led up to a sale, not just what ads got the most response,” said Commission Junction’s Riolo. Look at where the visitor landed on the merchant’s site, where and when people converted from shoppers to customers. Compare that to which product image you used, the product description and any keywords you bought to advertise on search engines and the text of your ad. “The combination of all this drives the consumer,” Riolo said.

This may sound like a lot of work, but it is worth your time. By tracking all these nitty-gritty details, you’ll get the big picture. Like a well-trained hunting dog, you’ll be able to anticipate the movements of your customers and sniff out the most profitable deals before they get away. n

SUSAN KUCHINSKAS, managing editor of Revenue, has covered online marketing and e-commerce for more than a decade. She is also the co-author of Going Mobile: Building the Real-time Enterprise with Mobile Applications that Work.