Analysing white labels
Today has been a little slow, not many sales yet, though it is mid-afternoon, mid-week and sales tend to pick up later in the day, and later in the week. I’ve not actually run a report to find out the exact bias on this, perhaps I should.
Ross, I know you read this, what’s your general finding on whitelabeldating.com - Approx what % of sales come in after 5 or 6pm during the week compared to earlier in the day, especially on casual sites like the ones I run with you?
I’m approaching a suitable time frame in a couple of days where I will have had sites with White Label Dating for 3 months so I am trying to dig in to my statistics to make comparisons to other platforms I’m promoting and have promoted in the past.
Affiliate Vs. White Label
Traditionally affiliate programs will deliberately hide a lot of the detail, often just give you your balances and member totals. They don’t want affiliates knowing what their own site performance is really like, what the margins are etc. It’s also true that when affiliates are paid a CPA they don’t need to be as interested in what goes on other than the conversion rate from traffic they send in to payments.
Generally an affiliate program will promote itself to an affiliate using the best case scenario - “earn $100 per payment” - what they don’t always tell you is that it’s only for confirmed credit card detail payments, or you need to be converting at 20% to get this. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this, it’s perfectly normal marketing and if affiliates make a profit everyone is happy.
White Label systems are generally more transparent with their commissions because they have to be, though this is not always true. Where you have to be careful is being given way too optimistic conversions and retentions rates which lead to unachievable expectations. Something I have witnessed and experienced personally. Not good!
Analysing a sites performance
The difficulties in comparing one system to another are:
- data is presented and accessed differently
- it is time consuming to collate
- I have to use a few algorithms to standardise the different data I collect.
Though I do like lots of statistics, most people are not as analytical as me. There is no great demand on white label providers to produce really extensive reports. Having worked for a white label provider I also know it is not a trivial matter.
Having too much data can be dangerous! You won’t find the information you need quickly, worse still if you produce multiple reports and there are discrepancies between them you’ll waste a lot of time scratching your head trying to figure out what is going on and debating which numbers are most accurate. Something I have fallen foul of. In my case I asked for explanation on the numbers from the platform owners but still to this day have no answer!
As I work with white labels, running my businesses on their platforms, I do need to have access to enough data to understand what my members are doing. I earn over the lifetime of those members so need to be able to plan and budget accordingly. Currently I have enough information at my fingerprints to do this.
The most important information you need is: Members, Paying Members, New Sales Totals & Re-Order Totals for any given month or pay period. This is enough to produce accurate reports.
The one variable I have little control over is time, which you also need when trending your members. Patience is not one of my virtues!
Once my first phase number crunching is done - I’ll post my findings.
7 Responses to “Analysing white labels”
1 Ross 19 November 2008 @ 4:58 pm
Hi Tim,
For me, over our entire partner network, I expect to see us hit about 55-60% of our daily revenues by 5.30pm.
That it to say - 40-45% of our revenues will come in after I leave the office (and when many of our partners start working!!).
The best partners are time-conscious in their advertising - they’ll put on their PPC campaign after 6pm and turn off by 11pm.
You’ll know from your experience with your partner manager at WLD that we’re very open about this kind of stuff - we know for a fact that we convert better than anyone else so I make no apology for being rather vocal about these kind of numbers.
I do think we need to improve statistical information further however, and allow partners to understand whether members on a Tuesday are more likely to convert than those on a Friday - or whether those joining at 8am are more likely to convert than those at 8pm etc.
I want to be providing this level of detail in early 2009 and we’re on track to do that.
Do you find that most of your revenue comes in the evening? Is this initials or rebills/re-initials?
Is this because people are more likely to pay in the evening, or because they joined in the evening previously? Perhaps the rebills are high at that time because partners generally market more in the evenings?
I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this,
Ross
2 Tim Rees 19 November 2008 @ 5:20 pm
Having looked at one of my sites, I have highest traffic at between 5pm and 11pm. Which is no surprise. The sites I have are ones which people are more likely to access from home than while they are at work.
Without looking at the payments themselves I am going to guess that this period will be best for me simply by assuming, on average, most payments will come when I have most visitors to the site.
3 Tina T 21 November 2008 @ 1:12 am
I just started looking into affiliate and white label, so I’ll be very interested to read more of your findings.
4 Shaun Measday 24 November 2008 @ 1:00 pm
Hi Tim, love the blog - especially as we are looking at breaking into the online dating market.
Do you have any commentary on the difference between different white label solutions in terms of the metrics?
i.e - WLD converts members to paid members at a higher percentage than wwdp?
All the best,
Shaun
5 Tim Rees 24 November 2008 @ 3:43 pm
I do have some information on the metrics - in fact I have page after page of spreadsheets on it. Making actual sense of it and reducing it to the most important metrics is something I hope to finish very soon. Specifically on how WLD compares to WDP which I will be able to release very soon.
Shaun and Tina, have either of you begun running any sites with any White Label providers just yet? I’d be very interested to hear what your own first impressions and initial thoughts are.
6 Shaun Measday 24 November 2008 @ 3:55 pm
Yes, we have started with WorldDatingPartners - was very impressed by their interface and functionality, but thus far, not as impressed by their conversion of members to paid members. Having said that, this is my first foray into the online dating world, so have no idea what to base my numbers on.
7 Tim Rees 28 November 2008 @ 6:02 pm
I advise anyone who has just started, or looking to launch a site to speak to WhiteLabelDating.com. My own experience has been very good with them and I have seen better results than on any other system.
I do have some numbers together now which will make their way on here very shortly. I will admit that they are not perfect because it was not done as an exact test, but more a basic comparison.
Leave a Reply