Newbie questions about CR

I put up a site mid june and a few days back signed uo as an affiliate. I get at the moment 60 unique visitors, 95% from MSN.

As a newbie I would like to ask a few questions:

1.Is conversion rate calculated from the visitors who come to my site for a relevant term or from the number of people who click through to the sellers site?

2.If I am selling blue widgets and people type other relevant terms such "widgets", "widgety widgets" etc and come to my site, do I consider that traffic as relevant having in mind that exact selling term is "buy blue widget"?

3.The seller is using custom affilaite tracking application (Interneka). The vendor advertise the package feature "total control of your affiliates). Without bringing honesty of the seller in question, I wonder is there any way to control/check CTR, CR rate. Actually CTR is shown in affiliate control panel.

4.How do I get an indication about average CR for the keywords used?

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Hi,

1. Conversion rate for your site would be calculated from the total visitors to your site. If you get paid for only sending traffic to the seller's site, then the conversion rate for your site would be (click through to the seller’s site)/(total visitors on your site). If you get paid only if a visitor referred by your site actually buys the product, then the conversion rate of your site would be (visitors who bought the product on seller’s site)/( total visitors on your site ).

2. The most relevant keywords would of course need to include the ‘action words’ like “buy” or “subscribe” or “rent” etc. “Buy blue widgets” is a more relevant keyword than “widgets”. Also, “buy widgets” is more relevant than “blue widgets”. A lack of action word would decrease relevancy. I would suggest assigning relevancy percentage to keywords for finding out which keywords would perform better than the others in terms of conversion. For example, ‘buy blue widgets’ can be assigned a relevancy of 100% and ‘blue widgets’ can be given a percentage of 50% because the visitors might be interested in acquiring information or buying.

3. I have never used that application, so I won’t be any help here. But most applications have the CR, CTR etc displayed through the control panel. You should have access to your CR for sure.

4. It should show up in the stats section of the tracking application. A good tracking application has that feature.

I hope this helps.

Now it is still early to calculate as I joined the affiliate program 4 days back. Early indications are not very impressive though, out of about 250 unique who came to my site 150 clicked through and 2 actually bought the items.

The items sold are at the highest prices on the market, it is possible to get same items of lower quality for less money.

In the affiliate panel I can't actually see what products were sold, only price and my commission, that leaves me in the dark about the items that sell the best.