Well, Think Visibility 3 was on at the weekend, and it was a great event. Many people I know couldn’t make it (shame on you), so here’s me rubbing it in with what I learnt from the weekend. Here I cover some of the things that I learnt from the event (keeping the very best stuff to myself!).

To those of you who haven’t heard of Think Visibility, it’s a conference covering a range of aspects from blogging, search engine optimisation, affiliate marketing, conversion optimisation, domaining, and more. The event is a pretty intimate affair, with around 150 people attending. As a result, the event is very friendly, interesting and a spectacular opportunity to meet your fellow digital samurai.

Speaker Tom Critchlow – Local SEO Strategies

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Tom Critchlow (@TomCritchlow) discussed how to get the best from Google Local, particularly with how you can improve the quality of your local business listing and improve your rankings within the map results. Tom had plenty of practical advice, particularly around citations and reviews.

What I learnt #1: Use your company name as your business name. The emphasis was very much a case of not trying to stuff keywords into the title of your business to improve your rankings. Why? Google actively discourages it and it can damage your rankings rather than improve them.

What I learnt #2: Reviews and citations matter in a big way. Tom said that at the moment, the quantity of reviews from different domains matters at the moment (a bit like backlinks), but quality of reviews (and the trust associated with the source domain) are quickly becoming a major factor.

Speaker Judith Lewis – SEO Case Studies

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Judith Lewis (@Judithlewis) had some advice based on her experience as an SEO. Judith specifically asked us not to blog or tweet about what we heard during the presentation. Therefore I am respecting that request.

What I learnt #3: Judith will do anything for (good quality) chocolate! Additionally, Judith’s presentations usually feature free chocolate!

Speaker Stephen Pavlovich – Conversion Rate Tips and Tricks

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Stephen Pavlovich (@BonyToad) runs a successful conversion optimisation business with some pretty significant clients. Stephen clarified what conversion optimisation really was, which is not just about changing your button colours!

Stephen covered the optimisation process, which included researching your traffic, coming up with solutions, testing, and reviewing your improvements. I also spoke to Stephen on one of my sites, where he kindly gave me a few more tips of things to test.

What I learnt #4: Use more tracking tools as well as Google Analytics. Some tracking tools will allow you to work out where people click on your website, which can identify potential issues on your site. One of many tools Stephen suggested was CrazyEgg.

What I learnt #5: Test different pages, but only do a few variables at a time. Testing too many variables makes it very hard to work out which variable is causing the improvement in conversions.

Speaker Kenny Goodman – Dynamite Domains

Photo Credit: sk8geek

The talk by Kenny Goodman (@KennyGoodman) was on “Dynamite Domains”, which was effectively about how to make money from domains and how to get hold of some really juicy domains. Kenny also announced a new tool he’s launching called Domain Face, which is designed to help you find some of these great domains. Kenny did get a little excited whenever he mentioned “dynamite” or “explosive”, I think he thought we were Americans!

What I learnt #6: Ask, and ye shall receive. Kenny kindly provided me with the opportunity to try the tool for free. Thanks Kenny!

Speaker Al Carlton – Making more hours with Outsourcing and Automation

Photo Credit: sk8geek

Al Carlton (@AlCarlton) of Self Made Minds and Coolest Gadgets was sharing his tips on how to save time and things he does personally to reduce his workload. Al covered a whole range of resources that you can use in order to outsource time consuming or complex work.

What I learnt #7: Don’t create a job for yourself! Essentially you don’t want to outsource in such a way that creates you extra work. You want to minimise the work you do to only work on aspects you enjoy.

Who I met at Think Visibility

I met a whole range of people at ThinkVis, many of whom shared with me some great tips and tricks for my own affiliate websites. Here are a few of the people I wanted to thank for advice they gave me.

• Jon (@JonTiffany) of About Loft Conversions – a long time friend of mine online, so it was great to meet in real life for the first time! Jon gave me some great advice on how to move forward with my career.
• Simon Barker (@simonbarker) of Zath – we had an interesting little natter about the practicalities of running gadget sites.
• Martin Wright (@mawawa – I spent a lot of time drinking with Martin, where he got to appreciate the finer side of my humour. I appreciated someone laughing at my crap jokes.
• Rob Cole of Focus Online Management – who doesn’t do twitter. Rob had some really interesting stuff to say on the topic of bingo websites.
• Patrick Moogan (@paddymoogan), who kindly mentioned my guest blogging platform BlogSynergy.com in his presentation on link building.
• Elaine (@ElaineAllkids) and Lee Forth of All Kids – Elaine gave me a simple tip of how to earn more from a niche website if I have a handful of successful products.
• Richard Kershaw (@QualityNonsense) of Quality Nonsense – a fascinating chap, where I got plenty of interesting ideas to test out on my own websites.

Finally, thanks to the team at ThinkVisibility (@ThinkVisibility) for a great event. You can see the photos of the event on sk8geek’s flickr stream.

Regardless of what website you have, are you tracking your visitors? The usual answer I get to that question, is “no”. However, if you’re not tracking your visitors, you should be. If you don’t know where to start, use Google Analytics because it’s effective and free.

The aim this article is to get you using some slightly more advanced visitor tracking enabled on your website. I’m writing the article from the perspective of an affiliate marketeer, however this Google Analytics advice can be applied to any website, such as landing pages, online shops, blogs, and so much more.

Affiliate Marketing – Very Quick Intro

Affiliates are people who advertise products and services that you can buy from a third-party merchant. In return for a sale, affiliates earn a commission from that merchant. To reach a larger audience and to save merchants hassle, affiliate networks look after the tracking and payments from merchants to affiliates.

Affiliate Link Tracking Codes

Typically as an affiliate, you create a direct link to a product or service page (called a deep link) that you encourage your visitors to click. You typically generate these deep links using the affiliate network’s deep link generator too.

As part of that deep link, you can include a reference. For example, a deep link on the Webgains network looks a bit like this (programme and affiliate IDs have been changed to protect the innocent!):

http://track.webgains.com/click.html?wgcampaignid=5678&wgprogramid=1234&clickref=my-useful-reference&wgtarget=http://www.mytargeturl.com/product.html

And a deep link via on the AffiliateWindow network looks like this:

http://www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=123&awinaffid=456789&clickref=my-useful-reference&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mytargeturl.com%2Fproduct.html

I use a different reference for each product, and therefore affiliate link that I have to the merchant. Here are a few examples.

• Product A – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=1&clickref=product-a
• Product B – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=2&clickref=product-b
• Product C – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=3&clickref=product-c

When you get a commission, that click reference shows up next to the commission that you’ve made (in the reports generated by the affiliate network). For example, here’s a small slice of my earnings via Webgains:

Webgains Transaction Report (click to enlarge)

In the diagram above, you can see the date of the transaction, the merchant, the commission and the click reference. That means I know exactly which product and link is generating a commission for me.

What’s the key benefit? I can determine which products make me money, and therefore spend more time on those product pages to earn even more! You basically get extremely valuable information about the products that either do or do not earn you money.

However, that’s only half the story. What about tracking what buttons/links/images your visitors are clicking on? Don’t forget, only a small number of visitors to your site will actually purchase something from your merchant.

We also want to know how successful we are at sending visitors to your merchant. That’s where we use Events in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Events

Google has a very comprehensive guide to events, so I won’t repeat it here. Essentially it’s an extra bit of javascript code that you add on to your outgoing links that allows you to track some information when a visitor clicks on that link.

This is ripped straight out of the Google’s Event Tracking Guide:

pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value);

• category (required) – The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.
• action (required) – A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
• label (optional) – An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.
• value (optional) – An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.

This is how I suggest that you use it:

<a href="#" onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Affiliate', 'Click', 'The Product Name');">Shop Now button, etc</a>

This means we group all outgoing clicks to affiliates under the category ‘Affiliate‘, and we call the action a ‘Click‘, and we label each link for each affiliate with ‘The Product Name‘. I’ve ignored the value parameter because we don’t need it. You’ll probably be using big red Shop Now buttons rather than a text link too.

Assuming that tracking code exists on all links that go out to your merchants, that means we’re tracking all clicks by your visitors to your merchants. We are also tracking exactly what link they are clicking, i.e. what product is causing them to visit the merchant.

Why bother? Well, we need a screenshot.

Event Tracking Labels (click to enlarge)

This is a summary of labels from one of my websites, namely my Spy Gadgets mini site (Content > Event Tracking > Labels in Google Analtyics). The chart shows the number of clicks per day on one of my affiliate links. The table below the chart shows the most popular products, i.e. those which received the most clicks out to the merchant.

What’s the key benefit? You discover which products encourage clicks to the merchant. That information can then be used to work out where you should focus your attention with the view of getting further clicks to the merchant (and hopefully a sale too!).

Conclusion

I’ve shown you simple ways to track what visitors click on, and what products/links actually generate the commission. That information will help you avoid speculation and actually focus on products/links that work for you. You also get data that allows you to measure the changes that you make to see if they’re an improvement.

Those of you who are experts on Google Analytics will notice that I am just scratching the surface. That’s intentional. I don’t want to give you all of my juicy tricks do I?