Did you know that only around 10% of online businesses succeed on average, with the majority failing within the first 120 days? About 90% of online companies can’t survive the first few months or fail to sustain their affiliate marketing ROI due to the absence of underlying key performance metrics.
But failure isn’t an option: you must survive times of turbulence and thrive. And you will!
Below is a toolkit of affiliate marketing metrics to measure your success across different strategies, channels, and audiences. With no further ado, let’s dig into the 17 most essential metrics in digital marketing.
ROI – The Metric that Tops the Bill
The ROI metric is the King of all affiliate marketing metrics. Here’s how to calculate ROI in digital marketing:
Calculating ROI is as crucial as simple. Suppose you’ve spent $1000 on an affiliate campaign that generated $1200 in profits. Your ROI would be 20%, or $200 more than your investment. However, if you’ve generated only $800 with the same campaign, the ROI would be -20%, indicating an unprofitable affiliate partnership.
Another way to calculate your affiliate marketing ROI is to divide the campaign revenue by the costs. From the example above, the profitable campaign would bear an ROI of 1.2 ($1200/$1000); the latter – 0.8 ($800/$1,000).
But there’s a catch…
As good as ROI is for a conversion-driven affiliate campaign, it cannot apply to all campaigns across all marketing channels, nor provide you with deep analytics. For some traffic channels and campaigns – for example, awareness campaigns – you need subtle digital marketing metrics.
Below are the 17 most important affiliate marketing metrics for an online business.
1. Conversion Rate
Most digital marketing campaigns must convert, making the conversion rate one of the most essential tools for measuring marketing ROI and the performance of a particular campaign.
Here’s how to calculate the conversion rate for your affiliate campaigns:
Another way to calculate the conversion rate for affiliate campaigns is by dividing conversions by total ad interactions. For example, for 100 conversions from 10,000 interactions, the conversion rate would be 0.1%.
- Conversion rate by channel is key for affiliate marketers, allowing you to zero in on specific traffic sources and see how well organic traffic converts compared to, for example, paid and social media traffic. In other words, you can find out where your highest-value affiliate traffic is coming from.
- Conversion rate by device helps you compare traffic sources, such as web and mobile, and identify missed opportunities. For example, if mobile users convert better than web users, it could signal an opportunity to double down on mobile-focused affiliate marketing campaigns.
Different traffic channels have varying conversion rates: phone calls convert up to 50% of callers, emails convert around 1.2% of users, and the average conversion rate is approximately 3.5%.
2. Cost Per Lead
Lead generation is the biggest challenge for any online business, especially in affiliate marketing. Increasing the quality and number of leads is the priority for 68% and 55% of companies, with 53% of marketers spending at least half the budget on lead generation. Knowing how much you pay for each lead is vital for affiliate performance.
Here’s the formula to calculate your cost per lead:
Comparing your cost per lead for different affiliate marketing channels – for example, email marketing versus print ads – enables data-driven budget allocation within your ROI-driven marketing.
Average Cost Per Lead by Marketing Channel
| Social Media Advertising | SEO | Webinars | Search Engine Ads | Content Marketing | Video Marketing | LinkedIn Ads | Referrals | Traditional Ads | |
| $53 | $58 | $31 | $72 | $110 | $92 | $174 | $75 | $73 | $619 |
Average Cost Per Lead by Industry
| Finance | Retail | Healthcare | IT | Media & Publishing | Business Services | Travel & Tourism | Education | Consumer Products | Telecom |
| $160 | $34 | $162 | $208 | $108 | $132 | $106 | $55 | $105 | $45 |
Varying by marketing channel and industry, your cost per lead in affiliate marketing must always be higher than your gross profit per sale, preferably two or more times higher. For example, if you’re spending $50 to capture an email lead, you must obtain at least $100 when converting it.
3. Cost Per Acquisition (Customer Acquisition Cost)
Cost per acquisition is the total you pay for one acquired customer throughout the entire affiliate marketing cycle:
Cost per acquisition must be higher than the customer’s lifetime value or the total profit one customer provides.
Average Cost Per Acquisition by Industry
| Industry | Insurance | Financial | Medical | Oil & Gas | Consulting | SaaS |
| Organic CPA: SEO and organic social media | $590 | $644 | $501 | $710 | $410 | $205 |
| Inorganic CPA: PPC, SEM, and paid social media | $600 | $1,202 | $755 | $1,003 | $901 | $341 |
4. Average Order Value (AOV)
Average Order Value (AOV) is the average value of an order, either for your overall affiliate sales or for a specific product or service:
For example, if 100 orders generated $5,000 in sales, your AOV would be $500.
AOV helps you understand affiliate customers’ purchasing habits, including their budgets and willingness to spend per order. More often than not, even a slight increase in per-order spending increases ROI substantially, making it reasonable to increase your AOV by upselling, cross-selling, free shipping, coupons, volume discounts, and more.
5. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the profit you can get from a customer over the course of your affiliate relationship. CLV is based on the sales value, the number of sales, and the customer retention period:
You can segment your affiliate customers by lifetime value to maximize the value of relationships with high-value, mid-value, and low-value clients while enabling a better customer journey.
Besides historical CLV, there’s a predictive CLV, a more complex parameter that requires machine learning and statistical regression to be calculated. However, with CLV, you can foresee your average revenue and thus improve your marketing and budget allocation.
Average Customer Lifetime Value by Industry
| Industry | Heath Consulting | Medical Billing | HVAC | Insurance | Financial Advisory | Digital Design | Business Consulting |
| Average CLV | $328,600 | $88,300 | $47,200 | $321,000 | $164,000 | $91,000 | $385,000 |
6. Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors leaving your affiliate website without taking conversion-driven actions, such as flipping through website pages, filling out a form, clicking on affiliate links, or – ideally – making a purchase:
For example, if 300 of your 500 daily visitors closed your landing page the second they landed there, your bounce rate would be 60%. In other words, you could expect six out of ten visitors to leave your landing page unless you improve it.
That said, it’s important to consider your affiliate website’s goals when interpreting the bounce rate, as a high bounce rate doesn’t always mean poor performance. Blog pages have an average bounce rate of 80%; content websites – 50%; service websites – 20%.
Average Bounce Rate by Industry
| Industry | Finance | Travel | Shopping | Real Estate | Games | Auto | News |
| Bounce Rate | 51.71% | 50.65% | 45.68% | 44.50% | 46.70% | 51.96% | 56.52% |
7. Exit Rate
The exit rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a specific page on your affiliate site to visit a third-party website:
Like bounce rate, exit rate helps you understand the performance of particular pages within your affiliate site. The difference between the two is that a bounce counts if a user exists on the same page they entered, whereas an exit counts regardless of what page they are leaving. Therefore, all a bounce is always an exit, but an exit is not always a bounce.
8. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of users who click on a link within your affiliate webpage, blog, email, or advertisement:
CTR measures how successful your affiliate ads are in capturing attention. Not only does a high CTR mean your ads draw attention, but it also allows you to get a discount on ads from Google, making your affiliate campaigns more cost-efficient.
Average Click-Through Rate for Search by Industry
| Industry | Finance | Real Estate | Auto | Apparel | Business Services | Health & Fitness | Shopping (General) |
| CTR | 8.88% | 8.55% | 8.15% | 2.24% | 5.51% | 6.39% | 2.45% |
You can measure CTR for literally everything. For example, knowing your blog CTR rate will allow you to understand how many visitors are willing to explore more of your affiliate website. The value of your blog traffic versus other channels will help you improve your marketing strategy.
You can measure CTR for brand and non-brand (general) searches to allocate your affiliate marketing budget more effectively across different campaigns. Besides, non-brand CTR can help you evaluate the performance of your SEO and paid search campaigns.
9. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net promoter score (NPS) measures how likely your customers are to recommend your affiliate product or service to their family, friends, and colleagues. In other words, NPS is the loyalty of your audience:
To obtain your net promoter score, ask a post-purchase question: ‘How likely is it that you would recommend this affiliate product/service to a friend or colleague?’ Then subtract detractors from promoters: those putting 9 or 10 are ‘promoters,’ 7 or 8 – ‘passives,’ 6 or lower – ‘detractors.’ You will get a number from -100 to +100 indicating how loyal your customers are.
Average Net Promoter Score (NPS) by Industry
| Industry | Finance | Software | Consumer Electronics | Consumer Packaged Goods | Utilities | Fashion |
| NPS | +44 | +36 | +52 | +41 | +58 | +40 |
10. Return on Time Invested (ROTI)
When managing affiliate campaigns, you must optimize your choices – allocate tasks to the best performers, arrange useful meetings, etc. – to ensure the invested time is well spent.
Here is how to calculate your return on time invested (ROTI):
For example, if you spent 100 hours training your 20 affiliate partners, allowing them to save 30 minutes a day consistently, your monthly ROTI would be 200% (20 working days in a month * 20 employees * 0.5/100 * 100).
11. Traffic-to-Lead Ratio (Lead Conversion Rate)
No matter how many people land on your website and how they get there – on their own, attracted by ads, or through affiliates – what matters is how many of them convert into leads and then customers.
Here’s how to calculate your traffic-to-lead ratio:
Lead conversion rate indicates how effectively you convert your audience. Like other metrics, it varies by industry, campaign, and traffic source, including affiliate-sourced traffic.
Average Lead Conversion Rate for Organic Search
| Industry | Finance | Healthcare | Real Estate | Legal | B2B e-Commerce | Auto | Travel |
| Lead Conversion Rate | 4.7% | 5.6% | 3.2% | 4.3% | 4.0% | 2.5% | 8.5% |
12. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)
Return on ad spend (ROAS) is how much you get in return for every dollar spent on advertising within a particular campaign, including affiliate marketing campaigns:
If you spent $500 on ads and generated $1,500 in sales through affiliate-driven traffic, your ROAS would be 300%. You can calculate ROAS for a single ad, campaign, or period to assess the effectiveness of affiliate campaigns.
13. Customer Retention Rate
The customer retention rate is the percentage of customers retained over time, which is crucial for understanding affiliate-led customer loyalty:
If you lost 50 out of 212 in a month while acquiring 70 new customers, your customer retention rate would be (232-70/212) *100 = 76.42%.
Average Customer Retention Rate by Industry
| Industry | Finance | Insurance | Media | IT | Auto | Healthcare | Retail | Telecom |
| Customer Retention Rate | 78% | 83% | 84% | 81% | 83% | 77% | 63% | 78% |
14. Unique Monthly/Weekly/Daily Visitors
The unique visitors metric is important to understand your audience and strategize your affiliate marketing, SEO, and advertising. Likewise, this metric can help you distinguish between affiliate-driven leads and first-time buyers.
15. Traffic Distribution by Channel
Search, referral, social, and direct traffic distribution can reveal your most and least important traffic sources so you can improve your budget allocation and grow your affiliate-driven digital marketing ROI.
Source: Serpstat
16. Branded Search Lift
One of the most undervalued digital marketing metrics, branded search lift, shows how many searches containing your brand name you get per month as a result of your digital marketing efforts. Branded search lift is useful for analyzing your affiliate marketing efforts across different channels.
Source: Google AdWords
17. Landing Page Performance
Landing page performance isn’t so much a single metric as a comprehensive understanding of how well your landing page drives conversions, particularly from affiliate-driven traffic. You can look at multiple data points – conversion rate, sessions by source, bounce rate, average time spent on the landing page, etc. – to evaluate and improve your landing page performance.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does ROI stand for in marketing?
ROI stands for return on investment, quantifying your profits versus investments ratio. An ROI of 100% means you’ve doubled your initial investment, whereas a negative ROI (for example, -10%) means that your total costs exceeded the returns.
What is marketing ROI?
Marketing ROI refers to the revenue generated by your marketing efforts, including affiliate channels, relative to the money invested.
How to calculate marketing ROI
The marketing ROI formula is as follows:
You can calculate ROI for digital marketing using one of the numerous digital marketing ROI calculators.
Why is marketing ROI important?
Calculating marketing ROI is important to understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, including affiliate-driven efforts, and get a chance to allocate your resources accordingly. Measuring digital marketing ROI enables doubling down on profitable and eliminating unprofitable marketing campaigns.
What is ROI in sales?
ROI in sales (sales ROI) is the profitability of your investment, including those driven by affiliate partnerships.
The ROI formula for sales is as follows:
What is the ideal, good, and acceptable marketing ROI?
The marketing ROI benchmarks vary for different industries, companies, and campaigns, including affiliate marketing efforts. The rule of thumb is that a good ROI for digital marketing is around 500%, while anything below 200% may not pay off, especially if the product production, marketing, and distribution costs are high.
What are digital marketing metrics?
Digital marketing metrics measure the performance of your campaigns, including affiliate campaigns. The most important digital marketing metrics are ROI, overall traffic, cost per lead, customer lifetime value, and more.
Is the lead close rate the same as the conversion rate?
The lead close rate is essentially the same as the conversion rate, indicating the percentage of leads you convert:
For example, if you’ve converted 50 affiliate-referred leads out of 600 in a month, your lead conversion rate would be 8.33%.
What metrics do not help in understanding ROI?
Since ROI evaluates the efficiency of your investment, any unrelated metric would be useless in evaluating or predicting your ROI.
How can digital marketing metrics help me understand the health of my business?
Every digital marketing metric indicates how well you’re doing in a particular dimension of your business. However, to interpret your metrics correctly, you must consider your business realities, such as your industry, scale, competition, and affiliate contribution.
You can use ratios of metrics, for example, the ratio of your customer lifetime value (CLV) to your cost per acquisition (CPA), to understand whether your business is healthy. A good CLV/CPA ratio is between 2 and 3 for a SaaS business (a ratio of one would indicate that you lose more money than you make).
What are the latest trends in marketing metrics?
Automation in tracking and analyzing marketing performance is a growing trend. Around 75% of companies are utilizing automation to save time, optimize affiliate performance, enhance customer engagement, and facilitate timely communication, with 25% planning to adopt automation soon. Automated marketing generates 450% more leads.
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