Tag Archives: testing

Must haves for affiliate marketers – Conversion Rate Optimizers

Jan
24

No doubt, if you are an affiliate or at all involved in online sales and marketing, you are going to hear the phrase “Conversion Rate Optimization” (CRO) a lot in 2010. It is not a new field, but it is now the most popular buzzword in performance-based marketing. In my opinion, CRO is always at the heart (and the art) of the science of performance.

If you are an online merchant, your websites are your best sales managers – they work hard (24/7) and cheap (compared to live salesmen). Whether you use your site to sell your products, collect leads or sell advertisement placements, there are two ways to make them perform better and sell more:

  • The expensive way – buy more traffic
  • The smart way – conversion rate optimization

Actually,   to increase the profit you should do both; however, you should perform conversion rate optimization before you buy more traffic. The essence of CRO is enabling your site to “close” more deals.

Here’s an example , and yes, this involves some basic math!

Jake Sully rents the movie Avatar from his website. From his past experience, for every 100 visitors from his PPC campaigns, 2 visitors rent the movie from which he earns $4 commission each. Since Jake is paying $0.05 per click, he spends $5 and earns $8 commission for 100 visitors.

It looks like it’s a nice campaign, with a 1.6% ROI (8/5).  Jake’s keywords generate 10,000 clicks a day, and with a $500 spend, $800 earning, that’s $300 profit per day.

Good…but not perfect.

By taking conversion rate optimization actions, Jake managed to improve his click-to-conversion rate from 2% to 3%, meaning that for every 100 clicks he is doing one sale more then he used to before the CRO. That’s one more sale of pure profit since the costs of clicks haven’t changed. So for every 100 clicks he spends $5 and earns $12. That’s 2.4% ROI! (12/5), and at the end of the day, after sending 10,000 clicks, Jake will spend the same $500 but will earn $1200, leaving him a daily profit of $700 (233% more!).

And don’t forget, one time CRO will affect the conversion rates for the rest of the campaign.

So, how should we optimize our conversion rates?

In one of

my previous posts, “What’s in Your User’s Mind?”, we discussed the importance of understanding the user’s way of thinking in order to improve the conversion rate.

To make a long story short, here are few rules of thumb to improve the conversion rates:

  1. Keep the opportunities for thinking limited
  2. Make  benefit-oriented headers, slogans and text
  3. Remove navigation bars
  4. Minimize the number of fields the user needs to fill
  5. Lead the user’s eye to the important places in the page
  6. Keep the important buttons (“Submit”, “Check out”, “Order Now”…) above the fold and use a clear call to action.
  7. Make sure your banners and landing pages match. If a user liked the banner and the offer in it and decided to click on it, he should get the same offering and the same look and feel in the landing page.
  8. Keep it simple, keep it clear and keep it short.

And as I always say – TEST, TEST and TEST.
Use few different designs and creatives, try different backgrounds, different buttons places, different “hero shots”, different headlines, different color combinations and whatever is replaceable. And always measure the conversion rate of each design in order to optimize it.

There are hundreds of tools and books on the net that can help you do the optimization such as:

As you can see, conversion rate optimization brings you pure profit and in the short and long-term it is a wise move, and an art that demands a good understanding of your users and the way they think. By testing and measuring you can do CRO with very low costs, but make a direct impact on your ROI.

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Making a pool out of a puddle: advice for Advertisers

Jun
21

Maor Sadra here with a tip for Advertisers:

Advertisers measure their return on investment (ROI) by calculating how much money they spent to generate a new lead/sale and comparing it to the lifetime value of the user. In today’s online advertising world, everything can be tracked and measured to measure ROI, so why do so many Advertisers limit their use of marketing tools and splash around in the same tiny puddle they are used to?!

Why not dig in deeper and create yourself a nice pool?

I used to work at a place where almost 80% of the online media budget went to Email Marketing. Over time, this limited our abilities to increase sales, as while Email Marketing is a highly effective method, you can easily saturate a market and even damage your brand name.
So while results were great in the short run, we soon got stuck with no ability to grow as we were recycling the same media again and again… and making our little puddle quite muddy.

To solve this problem, we began expanding our reach into different channels: PPC, Banners and Lead Generation, and found that our ROI was not the same for every channel, even when using the same CPA rates. We needed to adjust the target CPA by channel, thus working on 8 markets x 4 channels = 32 different CPA targets.
As complex as this sounded, using a pool of marketing tools and not just one helped the company expand, appeal to new users that were entirely unawa

re of the brand, and reach a steady positive ROI overall.

Today, I run across too many advertisers which refuse to run on specific media types, since they’ve tested it using the same target CPA they have for their best performing media type. One thing I always ask is: “Why limit your reach when you can simply adjust your rates to compensate for your ROI targets?”
With the variety of marketing tools available online today: Banners, Email, SEO, PPC, Behavioral Targeting, Social Media and more… the potential is as limitless as the combinations! After you multiply these different channels by the amount of countries Advertisers sometimes cover and the amount of different media companies Advertisers work with, you realize you should be working with hundreds of different CPA targets!

With that said, my tip for the day, and every day, is: Test Everything! Measure your ROI by channel and re-adjust your rates to allow a steady positive ROI. A major side effect of this approach is that in the long run, the more channels you run on, the more affiliates will run your offers. One of my favorite parts of affiliate marketing is that what works for the advertiser, works for the affiliates!

So, when it comes to choosing an online ad strategy, why splash around in that dirty little puddle when you could be lounging in your pool (complete with waterfall), drinking a Jamaican Smile with a paper umbrella sticking out of it?


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