Why do affiliate conversion rates vary?

I often receive emails about specific affiliate programs click through rates and conversion rates. Affiliates often wonder why their high click through rates provide little return and this causes them to question the sites they are promoting or even their own websites design and content. Every affiliate wants their site to produce the sale but the fact of the matter is you could be losing out to other sellers or directly due to the sites you promote. As with other aspects of affiliate marketing conversion to sales rate is reliant on a number of factors.

There are a few questions you should ask yourself (or others):

Have you analysed the landing page your link(s) point to? Would you be compelled to buy if you were the customer? Does the landing page tell the same story that your sales page tells? Are your visitors arriving from natural search or pay per click? Once you have asked these questions and the answers are all positive you can think about the other factors that contribute to click through and result in sales.

To analyse these factors you must follow the same route your leads would. This is all starts at the search engines your main source of traffic (whether that be natural or pay per click).

Step one: The person visits a search engine and they type in what they are looking for (this is called the keyword or key-term). They are trying to solve their problem and fulfill a need - this is the service your site should provide. Some of the results they see are natural and some will inevitably be paid links. If the person likes what they see in your description they are likely to click on your sites link, does your ad answer their question? solve their problem or address their need? All of this is important. A good example would be a site that sells x widgets being found in the search engines for the term y widgets, when the user clicks through to your site expecting to see x widgets and see y widgets they are likely to be dissapointed and annoyed, resulting in a lost sale. If this is not the case you can move on to step two.

Step two: Remember your users/visitors have arrived at your site looking for an answer to their question. So your content should provide an answer to that question. For example your user may have typed in cheapest consoles and you may be providing price comparison for consoles - in which case you have solved their problem and are more likely to get a click through - well done. Now move on to the next step.

Step three: Once you are producing good click through rates through your affiliates link the battle is half won. However, if these clicks result in little or no sales it is probably worth considering the landing page your link points to. As mentioned before it is important that your information matches the information provided on the affiliate sales page, it must also compell the person to buy. If it doesn’t contact the sites affiliate manager to talk it through.  If they want to make more money they will want to listen to their affiliates and make changes to improve sales, if they don’t then it may be time to switch to a different affiliate program. Tomorrow we will discuss the ins and outs of choosing the right keywords for your pay per click campaign -this also affects click through and sales.

As usual I hope this info has proved useful and would welcome any comments or input you may have.

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