Common affiliate marketing problems – low conversions

Second in the series of common affiliate marketing problems, I tackle low conversion rates. This is when you have an offer that is barely breaking even or losing money. You are getting traffic and know it your campaign has promise, but can’t seem to get there.

The first thing to look at is your landing page. This is the major thing you have full control over that can affect your profitability. A small tweak can be the difference between profit and loss. Keep split testing your landing pages until you find a way to boost conversion rate. What works for one offer might not work for another so there’s no one formula other than testing. Try completely different concepts as well as small changes. Try more preselling and less preselling. Don’t just copy every else’s pages. Sometimes its helpful to use a heat map tool like Crazyegg to see what people are clicking on.

Try direct linking. It may be your users are bouncing off your landing page before they get to the offer. Getting rid of that extra step may increase your profit. Again, testing is the only way to find out.

Lower you bid prices. If you are convinced you have the best converting landing page system, you may have to pay less for your traffic in order to be more profitable. Of course – another way to lower bid prices is to increase quality score.

Finally you can get better clicks to your offer. Many people don’t consider the traffic when thinking of conversion rates but it is a major factor. Curiosity clicks are conversion rate killers. These are clicks caused by ineffective ads that don’t really tell the visitor what they will see when they click. Sometimes it is good to grab all the traffic you can to an offer, but other times you want to pre-qualify your PPC traffic. This can be done with your ad copy. You can actually discourage clicks that would have a low conversion percentage by using specific wording an phrases. Describe the offer as much as you can. Let the visitors know exactly what you are offering, the price, terms, etc. People that click on really specific ads are likely to be buyers. Which can bump your conversion rates.

You can also pre-qualify visitors with your keyword selection. Consider removing information gathering keyphrases in order to get rid of people early in their buying cycle. Focus on more “buy words” to get serious customers who are ready to pull the trigger.