What's your conversion rate?

[CaroleE]

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Hi,

I'm interested to know what sort of conversion rates people are getting? We are currently getting around 2% from our affiliates, though our marketing consultant in the US told us that this was quite high for affiliate marketing.

Obviously the higher the better!
What do you guys think?

[Paul Wright]

Hiya CaroleE,

I run quite a few programs with CR's ranging between 1% and 15%.

Whilst CR is an ok indicator for monitoring the day to day performance of your own program I wouldn’t really take much notice when comparing your programs CR to others as there are way too many variables that make the comparison insignificant. Even when rival programs are in the same sector and have similar products you’ll have other factors which will skew the CR. Landing page, site design, leading offer, traffic quality, page leakage etc

For example, on one of my programs we have a chap who is very good at getting hundreds of pages ranking high for a wide variety of search terms. This person alone delivers so many clicks and impressions it throws the whole program of balance. Whilst he is able to deliver vast quantities of traffic it is not targeted like many others. If I was to remove his data from the equation the CR would jump from 4% to about 8%. However, sheer volume leads to the affiliate still producing significant sales and he is amongst our top performers. The leading affiliate however produces more sales with less than half the clicks – if only every affiliate could be like him

Cheers
Paul.

[CaroleE]

Thanks for the advice Paul.

So what about the affiliates that have really high clicks and leads but just aren't converting to sales? I have this one affiliate who has huge traffic but doesn't make sales for us. I guess the theory with us is that a lead (in our case, the order of a catalogue) may in time turn into a sale.

[Paul Wright]

Hmm,

Firstly is this affiliates traffic sustained across an entire month? If not then the affiliate has probably sent an email to his user base. If it is a continual stream then they could either run a very busy site, have high ranking web pages or could be running PPC campaigns.

If I was that affiliate and had recently joined your program I would be running a test on it to start off with… throw a few thousand visitors your way and see how well you convert. If nothing happens then I would be shrinking the terms down in my PPC, altering my creative or altering my webpage and it’s message to try and deliver more focused traffic. If nothing happened then I would be looking round for alternative merchants to promote.

Is there a major difference between your natural on site conversion rate and that of the affiliate channel? In my experience it shouldn’t be much difference either way.

I don’t know if you offer a hybrid program where you pay on leads and sales but I would be very suspicious of an affiliate who continually delivers a higher than normal lead percentage. This normally suggests they are incentivizing their visitors to fill in your brochure request forms for a reward without any intention to become a customer of yours.

Cheers
Paul

[CaroleE]

Our on site conversion rate is higher than that from our affiliate network, though it doesn't vary greatly.

We do pay for leads aswell as sales, though this affiliate doesn't appear to be offering incentives for his visitors to just fill in a brochure request. He has been an affiliate with us for a long time, though it is more recently that he hasn't been converting whilst maintaining the same levels of clicks. Ho hum....i'm just not sure...!

[khoirurizal]

Hi,

I'm interested to know what sort of conversion rates people are getting? We are currently getting around 2% from our affiliates, though our marketing consultant in the US told us that this was quite high for affiliate marketing.

Obviously the higher the better!
What do you guys think?

What do you mean by 2%? Is it click per ad, or the number of sales?

[Graham@Buyagift]

Conversion rate was mentioned, so that's % of people that click through and then buy. Click-through rate is the % of people viewing the ad that click through.

Graham

[SillyJokes]

Affiliate marketing is often sold to merchants as a way of getting better qualified, pre sold and good converting traffic but clearly from the conversion rates and comments this is not the case.

I see some affiliates converting at 5% and most much lower.

As an aside I complained to a directory I paid to be in (I know - what a waste of money) about the lack of traffic being sent. His reply was that since he redesigned the site it had fallen out of google and his SEO company was working on his google ranking (some hope) but had I converted all the clicks I had got into sales I would be quids in. Oh dear, does he really expect this? I feel embarrassed to have been duped by such a plonker.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should never pay for inclusion in a directory.