Data is important and affiliate marketing is all a numbers game. If you are not good at math then get yourself a super Asian but its not really that hard to understand numbers. Especially if you are getting data visually. If you can see pictures and decipher then it is fairly easy to look at your click patterns or even when it is a great time to launch a campaign. In the past I talked about day time parting and why it is important to take advantage of profitable hours of a day.
Today we are going to look at click patterns and understand them better. I got an irregular pattern of clicks a newly launched campaign, this is 24 hour time frame. This is from Friday, May 22, 2009. Also this is on Google Content Network targeting specific sites base on keywords - just placements.
What does this graph tell you about the click pattern? It seems irregular because it is up and down when there are active clicks. But does that provide us with enough information to determine if the offer I am running is profitable?
So what does the click pattern tell us? Well first notice the rise to traffic when starting it's day. During the late hours (EST) it rarely gets any clicks and it seems to me that the sites I targeted are not that active at night. Now starting at 11am it spikes up then by noon it drops back down. Interesting.
Throughout the day it does this, goes up for a spike then it comes back down. Now this is just 24 hours on 1day. This pattern may not happen on another day or when you gather a full analysis of click patter for a week, it may differ or it may not. What happens after a month, is it still the same?
This is just a days worth of data on a specific date, so the pattern may have been just to that particular day, was it a holiday? Did anything special happen on that day? What are my Google Adwords stats looking like? So there is a bunch of stuff to look and analyze.
Looking at this it seems that every other hour I am getting a spike and then it dips back down again. It continues to do this up until midnight. Where it has the last spike, which I will assume will go back down.
Now, since this is a new campaign I usually start it late night or mid day, depending how I feel. Since this started late night it gradually gained momentum and then kept a constant pattern across the Google network. It does dip back down but kept a steady pattern of rises and falls with minimal clicks.
If we look at it, the flow pattern is constant, it never grows. It just plateau at a tip point and never trys to break that. I should see another spike somewhere else, especially a time where there would be more traffic maybe after dinner? Or After 3PM? Depending on the demographics, but no it is kept right below a certain amount of clicks.
This is because this campaign is not on accelerated, but spread out for the day. There are 2 options when starting and running your campaigns accelerate or steady, Accelerate means Google will deplete you and give you the most possible clicks possible. Steady means it is controlled. Google analyses your CPC and your daily spend limit and provides you with a steady traffic base on what you give to Google.
