Beware These 4 Vanity Metrics of Misguided Progress (17)
Affiliates are taught to optimise religiously, to track relentlessly, and to always, always swear by their data.
We rely on metrics to guide us in the right direction.
That’s great.
But there are also several ‘vanity metrics’ that can indicate progress where you’ve actually made none.
Relying on them can blind you from the real task and provide a comfort blanket where you probably need a kick up the arse.
That’s what I wanted to touch on in this post:
Four Vanity Metrics of Misguided Progress.
See if any of them sound familiar to your work.
1. Profit Per Day
There’s nothing wrong with counting profits.
When it becomes a problem, as an affiliate, is if you start to project your profits.
Just because you’re earning $500/day from a successful campaign, that doesn’t mean you should start taking out mortgages quoting $182K as your annual salary.
Campaigns can tank at a moment’s notice.
And campaigns will tank at a moment’s notice.
There are two things you should be doing with your profits:
- Investing them back in to your business, preferably by developing a competitive advantage.
- Banking them and building up your capital safeguard for any nasty storms on the horizon.
Worst thing you can do is create a business plan that relies on the vanity metric of 'projected profit per day’ to drive the business forward.
If you are making decisions on the basis that you will have happy $X/days waiting for you in the future, you need to calmly collect your marbles, find the box titled ‘Affiliate Marketing’, and re-read the instructions.
Consistency is the name of the game.
The affiliate who is capable of replicating his $200/day profits will outlast the guy who gets lucky with a $1000/day winner.
You need only search 'Affiliate Marketing 2009' to see the naivety of assumed profit per day.
2. Number of Campaigns Launched Per Day
Have you had a day where you destroy your To Do list by 1pm and still feel unsatisfied?
The temptation with To Do lists is to do them as fast as you can, without really considering the strategy, and without stopping to think about execution along the way.
Some might call that a good habit.
Automation is good, right?
No — we’re not working on a factory line.
A creative spark doesn’t arrive by mindlessly executing the steps of a To Do list as a Pomodoro timer counts down in the background.
‘Campaign cramming’ — the art of launching lots of shit at the wall in rapid-fire motion — is one of the ultimate vanity measures.
It’s not the number of campaigns you launch that will determine if today is a success.
It’s the number of insights you draw from the campaigns you launched yesterday.
This is what increases your ratio of productive output.
This is also the key to saving your sanity and bringing some meaning to the work you do.
Stop counting campaigns launched, start counting insights gained.
3. The SOI Conversion Rate
There’s nothing sweeter than stumbling across a brand new offer that converts on a single opt-in (SOI), with a fresh database, a nice payout and a cap like a wizard’s sleeve.
Right?
The problem with SOI offers is that, whilst they are easier to optimise and get profitable — it is a completely makeshift world that they force us to advertise in.
You can spend 100 hours searching for placements where SOI Offer X converts at a profit.
Or you can spend 100 hours searching for placements where leads convert in to sales.
Which strategy do you think connects you to the real world of Metrics Worth Sweating?
Affiliates, perhaps understandably, seldom give a flying fuck. They dedicate most of their working days to two data columns:
- The revenue in their tracker
- The expenses in their traffic source.
It can feel like a real business.
But it’s not.
You can’t plan for your retirement on the back of a SOI conversion rate when the shit that you’re converting might be rotten to its core.
The only data that matters, and upon which every single affiliate payout is based, is this:
How many actual paying customers are you delivering? And how much are they worth?
TIP:
It’s pretty common for offer terms to preach: “We want users over 35, with lots of disposable income. Payout bumps will follow for good traffic.”
(What they neglect to mention is that "balls will be chopped" for anything else.)
A good way to shortlist possible placements is to go to Alexa and check out the site demographics of the placements you are targeting.
For example, adult advertisers know that PornHub is great for quality.
If you work in adult, you’ve heard this a million times.
Here are some of PornHub’s vital demographics:
PornHub Demographics:
I started trolling Alexa to find adult sites with similar demographics (and lots of search traffic). The higher the income, and the older the users, and the more search traffic, the better.
Well I soon found one gem that looked like this:
Mystery Adult Site Demographics:
I snapped up advertising straight away, and lo and behold, the merchant wants to marry me if it gets him more of the leads I’ve been sending.
The traffic quality is so good I’ve switched to revshare so that I can reap the maximum value.
(Something you should always do if you have cashflow + great lead quality)
This is the type of insight that simply won’t arrive for the marketer getting his flaps in a twist over SOI conversion rates.
Mainly because if he ran the same placement? He’d be losing money.
(While the merchant makes a killing in the background.)
There are affiliates who will dedicate careers to scoring a high conversion rate on a SOI without so much as a second thought towards the crocodile in the swamp, AKA Lead Quality.
If, on the other hand, you dedicate your marketing career to sourcing the best possible traffic by optimising for sales — then the swamp is yours.
Who is going to have the audacity to fuck with the guy delivering a factory line of plastic?
4. Page Views, Uniques & Hits Per Day
The fourth vanity metric.
I have purchased banners on platforms like JuicyAds that have delivered 10,000s of clicks… and completely under performed placements which might only attract 10-20 clicks per day.
That is the beauty of targeted traffic.
When I first got started in Internet Marketing, the currency for a website’s worth was how many uniques it attracted (and where they were from).
That’s because, back then, a webmaster’s chief driver of revenue was Google AdSense or whichever display network he was pimping his space too.
More hits = More revenue.
If you had the misfortune of working in a low CPM niche, then you had to grab an exponentially huge wave of traffic to increase your earnings. It was, and still is, terribly inefficient.
There’s this big misconception that if you’re going to build your own web assets, you have to aim big.
Thousands of uniques. Tons of page loads. Eye-watering analytics.
"Aim for the generic thousands per day or it won’t be worth shit."
How wrong you can be.
If you target the right vertical, you only need a small handful of traffic to make a lot of money.
And as affiliates, shouldn’t it be our business to know where that traffic exists?
I have a few websites in an adult vertical that I know to be a profitable space. They are currently averaging around $100-$130 day in revenue per 1000 page views.
If I sold the same banner space to Google AdSense, or to a display network, I’d probably get around $5-$10.
Likewise, with my blog (FinchSells.com), I only get around 1000 to 2000 hits per day but I’m on course to bank over $150,000 in this twelve month period by targeting the right crowd with the right products and the right affiliate links.
And that’s without using a single banner ad.
Uniques? Page views? Return users?
These are terms that webmasters came up with to try and disguise the fact that SALES make the world spin round.
Until you appreciate that every little aspect of our industry hinges on delivering sales, then your business cannot grow.
When people talk about affiliates being the best marketers in the world, that theory isn’t strictly true.
There are a ton of low-value affiliates who care only about their own bottom lines. It's offensive to compare them to the 'greatest marketers in the world'.
The world’s best affiliates know that, vanity metrics aside, performance marketing is directly tied to sales generated.
You can’t grow in this industry without forcing yourself closer to the metrics that matter.
What would you consider "building up your capital safeguard" ? just making sure you have enough campaigns that when they die they will cover you?
Originally Posted by peterpan
Like the old saying:
Fix the roof while the sun is shining.
This awesome Finch, really good perspective.
Awesome post finch, I would assume checking the demographics of adult sites your buying on could have a big impact on quality, never even thought to do that before 
Also are you using a paid version of Alexa here?
Finch, do you have any rules on your profits? For example, save 10%, spend 10% for fun and reinvest 80% for traffic?
Originally Posted by lewis69
Also are you using a paid version of Alexa here?
Originally Posted by peterpan
My main consideration is to balance investing (both time and money) in short-term campaigns vs. investing in longer-term assets (building websites, apps etc).
More and more of what I do is geared towards revshare, which in turn is helping my short term campaigns because it keeps my eye on lead quality.
All right on point as always.
Especially like #2. Great way to put that. Sent it to all my staff 
#3 is gold. Thanks for the write-up.
If there is one single metric that matters, it is risk adjusted profit (and its first derivative, risk adjusted profit growth).
All other metrics are intermediary metrics, not ultimate ones.
Originally Posted by peterpan
You have an edge when an affiliate finds your campaign and still can't directly compete with you.
new knowledge everyday...
Really glad to see this post! Vanity metrics are dangerous - I'm used to seeing them burn companies in the startup world.
Speaking as someone who's always encouraging people to launch more campaigns... #2 is brilliant. Definitely true.
Also, #1 is a lesson that isn't talked about enough. It's not about huge numbers necessarily, it's about sustainability at the level that does what you need it to do.
Great stuff, man!
Stop making so much sense Finch, it makes me uncomfortable! 
Seriously though, great post as always, especially this:
Golden tips as always!
Lots of great info here!
Thanks Finch
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