I wonder where you heard about this from :winkwink:
WG

Corvette how about allowing affiliates to see declined sales and accepted sales by ccbill?
I would love to see those stats....

Stats are important, but I'm no stats freak. As was touched upon by DrinkingHard, I'd rather build something new and see how it does, than spend time tweaking all my old stuff for a small % increase in traffic/sales.

Oh, and one thing about tweaking old stuff, is sometimes you tweak stuff the wrong way and actually break something that wasnt already broken.

I studied statistics (at the London School of Economics) and started working life as a chartered accountant: thus I have a lot of faith in statistics. But I am also aware of their limitations.

Statistics which only assign a low probability to an event, or which have to include very broad parameters to be more definite, are almost useless for everyday business. The value of statistics is especially limited in this industry because we fail to sell so much more often that we are successful, therefore most of us don't have big enough numbers to do very much with at all.

Bigger sponsors are an exception, but even they can only dig a little way before their numbers will also become suspect. And the problem which even they face, is how to accurately interpret the figures they can collate.

A simple example, you have three tours and you want to know which one works best. It seems obvious: which generates the most sales per visitor? Not so.

Let's say that initially you had one tour, so for however long, all your affiliates pointed their surfers at that tour. Thousands of neglected pages are scattered around the 'Net, still sending visitors to it. Your more recent tours are only being used by newer affiliates and those who keep their sites updated, all assuming new is better. Mixed in will be a small number of affiliates who have actually tested which tours work best for them. Etc. The point is that the three tours do not get the same quality of traffic and therefore a simple calculation is not good enough. You are not really asking which converts surfers best, but which one adds most to the intrinsic conversion potential of the surfers it receives.

Framing questions correctly is where the problems start. Next comes recognizing which figures need to be modified before they will be useful. Then finally, as in the "simple" example above, there is the often insurmountable problem of how to generate those modifiers.

I suspect that between the nature of this industry's statistics and the likelihood that few people understand statistical theory, we probably end up with more wrong decisions than right ones being made as a result of people looking too closely at their numbers.

Those stats are alot more stable than people think.

Shap, meet Steve Lightspeed. Possibly the biggest stats junkie I know.

I would love to be able to have a look at my own stats as an affiliate.
Its weird that paysite owners are allowed to check them at ccbill where affiliates are not.
If they are stable or not....both ways they will give me valuable information.
:)

Yup - one of the 'flaws' *if we can call it that* with it but you can see where a Marketing company in mainstream can use that for their clients :)

In adult, if it was sold as a module and priced to sell - it would have worked (meaning Dollars would have been welcomed better & sold) if everyone could have access to & control their own data (locally) without anyone else having access to it since it would serve each company & affiliates more to know exactly what link/pic/color/text was being seen/clicked/how many times etc...in order to better their product rather than rate how they stood compared to their peers & perhaps affect the amount of visibility they got in the end.

Bingo. I'm surprised he shut it down and didn't try to recoup by packaging it to sell.

Another short coming may have been him stepping on Evan's toes patent wise.

i've developed my own ways to decipher all the info at the processor and affil stats levels. site logs too. i think everyone has pretty much learned how to analyze their networks at the diff levels. its something you just have to sit and let your brain melt into for hours and hours. sometimes on saturday or soundays when i am jsut sitting around, i will intend to just look at one thing and then end up on some crazy 4 hour stats session.

na

i know a guy *cough* who has sales % send to his cell

Interesting comments Roger V. Hmmmmmmmm

:1orglaugh See what I mean :))

The power lies in the custom reports that are created when the numbers are pulled from the master database. The servers that run the backend and the servers that run members areas, front ends, transactions etc, etc are isolated from eachother.

I am a stats freak...

I think you should check your Karups stats.

Oh wait..


nevermind! LOL ;)

I just watched a news report on Walmart the other day... WalMart has the 2nd largest data center/computer system in the world, second to the Pentagon. They store all the details on every receipt for two years. They even track the weather, to forecast sales (example: people buy more pop-tarts before hurricanes).

I think the reason we dont care as much about stats, is because we have a product that never runs out and we don't have to worry about distrubution because customers come to us. Also we have a world wide market place, all the different cultures, locations, races, languages, etc make statistics very difficult, just because one thing works here doesnt meant it will work elsewhere, which creates a large margin or error.

http://www.t3report.com


Fight the duhhhhhh!

I'm a complete stats freak

Yes they have more data compiled than any other company in the world.

They know things like a high percentage of customers who buy eggs also buy bread at the same time....so they put the eggs and the bread on opposite sides of the store and make the customer walk past lots of high margin display items on their way from one to the other.

Little things like that add up to big $$.
Also they've managed to compile all of this data without ever forcing their customers to use those annoying "cards" that other places use to track your shopping habits.

You'd be amazed how many large programs don't have access to data that could help them.

For instance when I promote a new program I'll ask the rep or the owner which of the girls or episodes in the members area is the most popular/most downloaded.
I figure the one that the members watch the most will also be the one that will convert the most surfers to members.
Over 90% of them have no idea.

Or which trailer on the tour is the most downloaded? That's the one that should be at the top of the first page, but if you don't know which one it is then you can't use that information to make $$

Good luck I have learned just using common sense with some creative marketing skills and lots of trial and error is just as effective. Porn is an impulsive act so anything can trigger someone. and everyone has their own taste.

Also you can only collect data in an aggregate so be careful you don?t break any privacy laws on how you collect data..

Can't compare us to mainstream brick and mortor type Businesses because they dont have the endless amount of product to choose from they control what the consumer buys with cheap effect products

Good luck with it though BTW we still need to do some biz..

My Biz partner and I are stats freaks too. We built our own programs to capture and analize info. It is amazing how well it has helped us.

Good thread, some people just don't care about anylazing what they are doing.