What is a performance report in an affiliate system? Why is it important? No venture can be successful without periodic performance appraisals. Your affiliate marketing venture is no exception. Using a performance audit, you will easily see what worked and what did not. You can then proceed to repeat what worked and drop whatever didn't. A performance report clearly depicts over a designated period of time the performance of an item type (eg., a promo type) and clearly reports which individual item did well and which did not. The units of performance measurement are commission, clicks, sales, or leads. The report can all analyse in various ways why some items did better than others. All of the information garnered from the reports will help you make intelligent decisions for future plans based on the factual information generated. . Let's use an example of how helpful these reports are. When you first set up your promos, you thought visitors would be drawn to the most visually attractive promos. With this in mind, you spent USD 500 to make flash banners and only spent USD 50 for text links. To your surprise, after six months your performance reports indicate that text links accounted for 80 percent of your total affiliate sales while the flash banners failed to attract any sales at all. Armed with the information from this report you know to increase the future budget for improving the text links. You also know to share this information with all of your affiliates so that they too will make intelligent use of text links. What are the different types of performance reports in an affiliate system? The following are different types of performance reports generated in affiliate system software: - Overall performance reports
- Performance reports for affiliates
- Performance reports for affiliate groups
- Performance reports for promotional groups
- Performance reports for promo types
- Performance reports for individual promos
- Performance reports for referrer URLs
- Performance reports for websites (for multi-website merchants)
Do all affiliate software products include performance reports capability? All affiliate software comes with some sort of reporting system. However, in most cases, the reports are for day-to-day management and they do not analyse any performance data. Before you purchase any affiliate software, first view a demo to ensure that it includes the capacity to generate the types of reports you really need. | 
