HELP - FAQ
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Sales Tracking |
What kind of affiliate tracking software is used?
What is the visit-to-sales conversion of the 2U site?
How can I know who has visited my site, and what are my traffic stats?
Can I track my commissions in real-time, sale-by-sale?
How are my sales tracked?
Your sales are tracked through your 2U subdomain (ie what goes before the domain 2U.co.uk - eg your-business.2U.co.uk). Everything that goes through your 2U subdomain website is tracked to you, via the prototype 2U software, owned exclusively by 2U, and developed in-house. This means we control it, develop it and improve it, without any other corporations' control, so you can offer 2U feedback that we can act upon, without having to report to any other organisation.
Due to the way
the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption certificate works, certain products take the customer through the main
www.2u.co.uk site, but the commission is still tracked behind the
scenes with your subdomain in order to allocate the sale to you.
Your sales will show in your sales statistics,
once you are logged in at http://users.2u.co.uk. NOTE sales stats
only show when you have made sales. No sales = no stats.
What kind of affiliate tracking software is used?
The whole system is proprietary. This means that it has been developed for us and us alone. We do not rely on anyone else's software to do this for us. We have an excellent in-house development team that work full time on further developments and improvements.
What is the visit-to-sales conversion of the 2U site?
A key point for you to know is the average conversion rate, from site visitor to buying customer. This
will give you an indication of how many people you need to send to your site in order to get one sale. The other
statistic you will want to know is the average order value per customer purchase.
The 2U conversion
rate totally depends on the quality of traffic coming in. Some affiliates are bringing in targetted traffic
(particulary for the mobile phone insurance) that is seeing a traffic-sales conversion rate of 3-10%. This is excellent.
On the other hand, others are bringing in totally unqualified, untargetted traffic (typically with poor-quality exit traffic from
other sites) that is getting almost zero conversions eg 10,000 page impressions with no sales.
The important factor is targetting, and PRE-selling - ie encourage your potential customer to purchase 1 product,
and send them to that specific page. Affiliates who do this are seeing far higher conversion rates, and are taking
home far more each month.
You can get your specific traffic figures using the
traffic stats here
Once you have your traffic stats you can calculate 2 key metrics:
- Visitors-to-sale conversion rate: ie how many visitors it takes to make 1 sale. Take your total monthly sales and
divide by the number of unique visitors in that same month, then multiply by 100 (to get it as a percentage).
For example, if you made 12 sales and had 1000 visitors in a month, then your visitor-to-sale conversion rate is 12 divided by 1000, multiplied by 100 = 1.2%. SO in this example, for every 100 visitors, we would expect to make on average 1.2 sales.
You can do the inverse of this to get to how many visitors you need to make 1 sale:
Take your unique visitors and divide by your sales. In this same example take 1000 visitors and divide by 12 = 83.333. That means it takes (in this example) 83 visitors to make 1 sale.
- Average visitor value: ie how much each visitor is worth. For any given month, take your net profit and divide by the
number of unique visitors.
For example, if those 12 sales made £20 commission each thhat is a total profit of £240. So £240 divided by 1000 = £0.24
A handy use of such a statistic tells you that, if you use Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, (in this example) you need to spend less than £0.24 per click to then make a profit.
NOTE: DO NOT walk into PPC blind - spend a lot of time learning about it first or you will lose money fast. Read this PPC tutorial to start with here
How can I know who has visited my site, and what are my traffic stats?
Your 2u site's traffic stats are available. They are in-depth data on who visited your site and how.
This software usues actual log files (recording of everything that happens on your site). This means it has to crunch through big files with a lot of data, which means high server load.
To learn more about how to get access to your traffic stats, with your normal 2u username and password at
login here
Can I track my commissions in real-time, sale-by-sale?
Yes, (as well as old archived invoices) from within your user area at http://users.2u.co.uk/.
Sales will only show when sales are made.
Below is an example of sales statistics and a pending invoice.
To find out more on how you would be paid your commission, go to the Commission Payments
Do I get credit for the sale after a customer visits, leaves, then comes back to buy at a later date?
Yes! The tracking system does not use cookies. It tracks the sub-domain (i.e. your-business.2u.co.uk) and credits your 2U account with the details. Cookies normally expire after a certain period meaning you would not be credited with sales from this customer after this time, if we used cookies. We don't! So, no matter how long after your customer hears about you, they can go to your site and you will get the commission on their sales.
Will I get credited for bringing a customer to the site who doesn't actually buy, but signs up to the newsletter?
Yes! This is where the power of the 2U technology comes into play. If a customer visits your 2U site and signs up to the 2U promotions newsletter, we will store their name and email address to later contact them.
However, (and this is the clever part) we will also be storing YOUR 2U subdomain, such that in the future, emails that go out to this customer will not only let them know about the great new offers available etc, it will give them the link to YOUR 2U site. This means that YOU get the credit and commission for the marketing that WE did for you, because YOU brought us that customer in the first place!
Isn't that the best service you have ever had from an affiliate system?