Reading your analytics

What impressions, clicks and CTR actually mean here, and which numbers to act on.

Impressions

How many times a linked keyword was actually visible on screen. Not pageviews — a link far down a long post that nobody scrolled to did not get an impression.

This is the number that tells you whether a link is getting a chance. A link with no impressions is not underperforming; it is not being seen, which is a keyword problem, not a link problem.

Clicks

Somebody clicked the link and went to the destination.

Recorded in the background, after the reader has already left, so counting a click never slows down or interferes with them getting where they are going.

CTR

Clicks divided by impressions. This is the honest measure of whether a link is working, because it accounts for how often it was actually seen.

A link with 12 clicks from 2,000 impressions is doing worse than one with 4 clicks from 100, even though the first number is bigger.

What about commissions?

We show clicks and impressions. We do not show your earnings, because for most programs we cannot.

Amazon Associates does not report conversions to third-party tools at all. That is their policy, not a limitation on our side, and any tool claiming to show you Amazon commissions is either asking for your Amazon login or estimating.

Some networks do report conversions, and support for those is being built. Amazon will not be among them.

In the meantime the honest workflow is: use CTR here to work out which links and keywords deserve attention, and your affiliate dashboard for what you actually earned.

Filtering by site

If you have several sites, the domain filter splits the numbers per site. Useful when one site is carrying the others and you cannot tell from the totals.

What to actually do with this

  1. High impressions, no clicks — the link is being seen and ignored. Usually the keyword is too broad, or it is linking in a context where nobody is shopping.
  2. No impressions — the keyword is not appearing in your content, or it is only in headings, where we do not link. Check the phrase against a real post.
  3. Good CTR, low impressions — this one is working. Find more phrases that point at it.

Something here wrong or unclear? Tell us — we would rather fix the page than answer the same question twice.