In my last post I mentioned analytics as a good think to do during the crisis. Check where the value is in your webtraffic, content etc. and what is a waste. This way you can make your webpresence more effective with the existing resources.

With ‘effective’ do not only think about sales. If time to conversion is getter longer because people are waiting longer before they buy/invest, or if you website is just not an ecommerce site. It may be wise to track leads.

The thing with leads is that you have always this value issue. How valuable are my leads and if I have valuable leads how did I get them.

When you are using only your webanalytics software the best you can get is a conversion rate for leads. You can check which source of traffic is giving you most leads. But this does not say anything about quality.

To get quality info you can do two things. Either you separate lead paths so that you can measure them separately. Or you add info to the lead.

Adding info to a lead can be done manually by asking people to mention or ask for a particular word/code. This way your sales team receiving the leads will have more info about the traffic source.

But you can also integrate you analytics with you CRM for example using Google analytics.

Lately I meet more companies doing online advertising, like Google Adwords, without a good analytics in place. When you don’t measure the results of any campaign, you waste your money.

You see your traffic is growing and you think you are doing a good job. But is this traffic interested in what you offer? Do they ask for more information? Do they buy your product? If you don’t measure that, you don’t know .

In stead of using your own analytics tool you should start with implementing Google analytics. It is free, and in stead of focusing on the amount of traffic you will move forward to a ‘relevant traffic’ focus.

With analytics you get insights in all visitors but you are especially interested in the visitors who buy, subscribe on your site etc. When you follow their behaviour you know what they search for and where they came from.

With this information you don’t need to buy expensive advertisements on crowded websites anymore. You buy ads on relevant places which pay off directly.

Affiliate marketing can be a great way to get relevant traffic to your website. You only pay a commission when this traffic is giving some result.

I always compare affiliate marketing with offline retail. Retail is making money by selling your product and keeping a part of the revenue. For Brands it is always wise to have this distribution channel in place. But just like with offline retail you must have a strategy.

When you are for example a luxury brand. You only want to see your product sold in exclusive shops. Otherwise you harm your brand. On the Internet this issue is even more relevant.

Good affiliate networks always let you, as advertiser, review each website to decide if a website is a suitable match for your brand. But still this is not enough. We have seen examples of big brands getting in very bad places. (check German examples here).

To prevent Brand damage you should always manage your affiliate programs properly. Is there anything strange going on in your program. Affiliateblog.nl (in Dutch) comes with a lot of things you should look at. In short, ask yourself this questions :

• Check your top-10 affiliates. Do you know them? Where do they get their traffic from?
• Check your stats. Are there any affiliates delivering huge amounts of traffic with a low conversion and/or high bounce rate?

To start with affiliate marketing in Switzerland you can start with Tradedoubler.
More basic info about affiliate marketing on wiki.