The question I’m frequently asked is this. “What’s the most relevant stat for selling a product as an affiliate?” Well, this isn’t a simple question to find answer to because stats can be so deceptive. There’s an ancient saying…lies, damn lies and statistics. There is a purpose for it. Anyway, in this article I’m going to uncover a few of the major stats affiliate marketers take note of and give you my opinion of their relevance or lack thereof.

Let’s begin with gravity. This is one stat that affiliate marketers take note of, often, before anything else. They see a high gravity and instantly presume that the product is a major seller. What they don’t know is that, for beginners, gravity can be manipulated through some rather deceitful methods that I won’t get into here. For another, just because a product has a high gravity doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy marketing. In fact, for a fresh affiliate, high gravity products, because of the competition, can be very difficult to market. As a result of this, gravity is a very deceptive stat.

What about referred percentage? This is the percentage of sales generated by affiliates. By itself, the stat is actually worthless. You will want to know why? Let’s say you find a product that offers a referred percentage of 100%. This would lead you to believe that all the sales generated are coming from affiliates, meaning it’s very simple to market. But what if it’s a brand new product and the actual raw numbers (which you can’t know) reveal that there are only three affiliates promoting the product? Without more affiliates out there AND the product creator actively marketing it, there is simply no way to know TRULY what success affiliates are having.

Lastly, we have dollars for each sale. I own up that I sometimes let myself to get sucked into this stat and I should know better. This may be the most deceptive stat of all. The motive is as follows. A lot of product creators promote more than one product under one account. So you could see a dollar per sale of say $30 for a product when in truth, the product is selling for a lot less or even more. The other products in the catalog may be responsible for the price that is displayed. That’s why you MUST actually go to the sale page to check out what the product is ACTUALLY selling for.

So what does all this tell you? It tells you that you really can’t rely on any ONE statistic because as I said, stats lie.

With affiliate marketing…it’s no different.

To YOUR Success,

John Benjamin