Using Google Analytics To Choose An Affiliate Product

Suppose you know that people are reaching your site after searching for a variety of phrases like:

1. computer cases
2. keyboards
3. computer mouse
   

That's great! There's a good chance that people searching for these things want to buy them. That means you could put links/banners on your site that sell affiliate products.
For example, you could sign up for some affiliate programs on Commission Junction whose merchants sell computer cases, keyboards and mice.
Here's the problem: which products do you put on which pages? If you have a page titled "Computer Cases", then it's a no brainer to advertise computer cases there.
However, it's not always obvious what search phrases bring people to your different pages, and therefore it becomes difficult to select the right products on the right pages.
For example, your home page is not targeting any particular phrase, yet people are finding it in the search engines.

This guide will help you find what affiliate products you should be advertising on which pages.

Using Google Analytics To Make Affiliate Sales

Let's use the previous example and imagine that we have a content site that has pages about, amongst other things, computer cases, keyboards and computer mice. Those pages already have banners on them advertising appropriate products for sale. Your home page, however, just contains content and a huge gaping space where an affiliate offer could go.

You're missing out at the moment, because the home page is generating the most search engine traffic by a long chalk. But what can we advertise there? We could just make an educated guess and advertise any old computer related affiliate product.
But because we are traffic analysis ninjas, we will, instead, take the slick, professional approach and scrutinise our Google Analytics traffic stats.

The thing to do here is find out what search phrases bring traffic to the home page. Search phrases per page is information that is not provided for us on the Google Analytics dashboard, so we will have to create a custom report to get it. Don't run away! It's not that scary. In fact it's quite simple.

What we need is a list of URLs and a list of search phrases (and their counts) for each URL. Let's get cracking.

Click Custom Reporting on the left and then click Create new custom report. From the blue Metrics section on the left, open up the Site Usage category and drag Pageviews onto the first metrics box in the report area. We've finished with Metrics now and we need to choose some Dimensions.

From the green Dimensions section on the left, open up the Content category and drag Page onto the very top Dimensions box in the report area. Now open up the Traffic Sources category and drag Keyword onto the first sub dimension box.

That wasn't so hard was it?

The report is ready, so click Create Report.

You can ignore the graph at the top and concentrate on the list of URLs beneath. Here, we have a list of URLs with their pageviews. If you click on a particular URL you will then see the keywords that brought search engine traffic to that page. Cool. This means that we now know what people were searching for when they arrived on that page, and can match them with suitable products.

Google Analytics rocks.

This is attacking the task from a page level perspective i.e. show me all my pages and now show me what search terms brought people to those pages. We'll now sharpen our hunting skills by approaching from a search phrase angle. That is, find out what the most popular search terms are that bring traffic, and find what pages they deliver traffic to.

Finding The Most Popular Search Terms

Easy one this. Create a new custom report and drag out the following metrics and dimensions:

1. Metrics: Pageviews
2. Dimension: Keyword (in Traffic Sources)
3. Sub Dimension: Page (in Content)
   

Now when you run the report, you'll get a list of search terms that brought traffic, and they're presented in Pageviews sequence so we get the most popular searches at the top. Clicking on a particular search term will show you the page that the searcher landed on. Remember that different pages on your site may turn up for the same search so you may see multiple pages for each individual keyword.

So now we know that the most popular search is for "pink spandex tights" and when people search for it, they usually find the home page. Get those affiliate products on the page immediatement!


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by: http://kedirizone.blogspot.com

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