A question I often get asked is this one. “What’s the most important stat for marketing a product as an affiliate?” Well, this isn’t a very easy question to answer because stats can be so misleading. There’s an old saying…lies, damn lies and statistics. There is a reason for it. Anyway, in this article, I’m going to cover a few of the main stats affiliate marketers look at and give you my opinion of their importance or lack thereof.

Let’s start with gravity. This is one stat that affiliate marketers look at, usually, before anything else. They see a high gravity and immediately assume that the product is a big seller. What they don’t understand is that, for starters, gravity can be manipulated through some rather devious tactics 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 to sell. In fact, for a beginning affiliate, high gravity products, because of the competition, can be very hard to sell. Because of this, gravity is a very misleading stat.

What about referred percentage? This is the percentage of sales that are sold by affiliates. By itself, the stat is actually meaningless. Why do I say that? Let’s say you find a product that has a referred percentage of 100%. This would lead you to believe that all the sales of it are coming from affiliates, meaning it’s very easy to sell. But what if it’s a new product and the actual raw numbers (which you can’t know) reveal that there are only three affiliates selling the product? Without more affiliates out there AND the product creator actively selling it, there is no way to know TRULY what success affiliates are having.

Finally, we have dollars per sale. I admit that I sometimes allow myself to get sucked into this stat and I should know better. This may be the most misleading stat of all. The reason is as follows. Many product creators sell more than one product under one account. So you could see a dollar per sale of say $30 for a product when in reality, the product is selling for a lot less or a lot 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 see what the product is ACTUALLY selling for.

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

With affiliate marketing…it’s no different.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Tired of being an affiliate failure? Want to turn yourself into an affiliate assassin like I am? Want to land in the top 20 of every affiliate promotion you tackle just like I do? Check out my site at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/affiliateassassin/index.html and start earning a solid income as an affiliate marketer.