Playing The Affiliate Marketing Numbers Game

Business is a numbers game and that’s particularly true of internet business. With affiliate marketing, it really all comes down to this – the more (quality) clicks you can generate the more money you will make.

The problem is when you’re starting out in affiliate marketing, getting a feel for any numbers can be pretty difficult.

How many visitors do you need to click on X number of ads to generate Y number of sales?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer. Not for you anyway. There are so many variables at play that it would be impossible to give anything other than a wild guess in answer to that question. What I can do though is give you some idea of how my numbers stack up.

My numbers aren’t huge so don’t read too much into them, but it’s always worth taking a peak at how someone walking a similar path to yourself is doing. You may perform better or worse than me, but at least you’ll have some sort of yardstick to measure your own efforts by.

Anyway, here’s some figures that I thought you might find of interest from stats pulled from my Affiliate Window account.

Over the past two years I’ve generated 52,332 clicks across a diverse range of merchants. Of those clicks, 1.79% resulted in a sale and me earning a commission. So basically for every 1,000 visitors I sent to merchants’ websites, 18 people bought something. On average each of those clicks was worth 8p to me – that’s less than half what a Google Adsense click is worth to me.

Those figures hide a multitude of sins. For example, as I’ve said previously, text links convert far better than banners for me without exception. In fact, I’ve displayed some banners thousands of times without so much as a click through. This obviously begs the question, why use valuable space displaying banners? A no banners policy is a route I have considered – and may test on a site in the very near future – but I feel they do offer a supportive role to text links and often make a page look far better than it would without them.

Also some merchants convert far better than the 1.79% average quoted above. Flower merchant Bunches.co.uk for example, who I can regularly promote with a 10% discount code, have a conversion rate of 14.45% from 436 clicks. Not the biggest sample granted, but I’m certain if I had more of the same quality of flower buying visitors to send their way, the conversion rate would remain well above the 1.79% average. Other sites that convert well for me are the gadget and gift sites like Findmeagift.com (6.60%), Firebox (6.14%), Iwantoneofthose.com (3.90%) and Gadgetshop.com (3.23%).

I won’t embarrass any merchants by saying which ones convert far worse than the average, not least because my own promotion could be at fault as much as say poor merchant website design or reporting leakage. Conversion rates are also affected by the price of the product or service being promoted. Everything else being equal, it’s easier to sell low ticket items in volume than it is high ticket items, but the more expensive items may still prove more profitable despite a lower conversion rate. A couple of merchants that I promote that have low conversion rates actually earn more for me per click than some of the merchants I promote with higher conversion rates.

One thing that I don’t think is a big factor in terms of conversion rates is cookie length. That’s because my best performing merchant of them all is amazon.co.uk which offers only a one day cookie. Again, I promote Amazon products almost exclusively via text links and over the same time two year time frame I’ve been able to convert 12.97% of 20,585 direct link clicks. So for every 1,000 visitors I send to Amazon, 130 of them will buy something.

I believe the reason for the very high conversion rate with Amazon is down to several factors. I’ve been working with Amazon for years and have some excellent niche websites that are perfect from promoting Amazon. People are also more likely to be familiar with Amazon’s website and I do tend to sell mainly low cost items (under £20) so there will always be less resistance to buy.

More importantly though, Amazon make ordering products incredibly easy. There are certainly plenty of merchants out there who could learn a great deal from the Amazon order placing process.

To earn more money I need to either increase my conversion rates or increase the number of clicks by increasing my traffic. Or indeed do both. I’ll be looking at ways to do this over the Summer in the hope that I can benefit from any improvements come the Christmas shopping season (when conversion rates should increase anyway because of the season).

A 1.79% conversion rate may be good or it may be bad, but from my experience with Amazon and Google Adsense I know there is definitely room for improvement. And that gives me something to work towards. I’ll post an update in a year’s time to see how I get on and will hopefully be able to share some successful ideas for boosting conversion rates and earnings.

Happy selling!