HELP!! lots of affiliates no sales or refferals

[qwerky]

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I agree the £7.00 fee for living in a house would stop me as a DIY'er from ordering from the site.

If i was a business the site is painfully slow from page to page, i would give up if i wanted a mixed order of more than a couple of items and search for another site.

[grahamT]

Thanks everbody, brilliant advice!!!

I have dropped the carriage and lo and behold more orders in 3 days than for the entire prevoius month, I did think it was high
and i thought the £7 extra was a little strange.

all the other valid points are going to be done, explanations, secure server for all the checkout (do you think the epdq is good or bad) and better pictures.

our average order value is still (well) a few about £100-200 and about 20% over £600. our pricing is well below our nearest competitor "fascias.com" and now the carriage is free!!


So if you could all build some affilliate sites now and drive the traffic this way would be wonderfull.

keep you updated on the commision level, probably manage it through affiliate futures as they have already had a wack off me.

please feel free to slag it off some more

and thanks again

[B1gJo3]

Freephone number is still prominently placed at the top. Put it out of the way, affiliates just see this as lost opportunity.

[grahamT]

Originally posted by B1gJo3
Freephone number is still prominently placed at the top. Put it out of the way, affiliates just see this as lost opportunity.

problem is Catch 22... I dont have any good affiliate's yet and the freephone number accounts for a good bit of business.

Will have to look into tracking calls..

[Qui Gon Jinn]

Maybe have a different landing page for affiliate related traffic, or simple piece of coding so that the number does not display during an affiliates cookie period.

Another option is that if you know what proportion of sales go through your call centre (leakage) compared to online orders then adjust the inbalance by increasing commissions respectively so that the number can remain prominent.

Out of curiousity how effective is yor pay per click management. Are you getting a return on investment (ROI). For example we don't see you on Google Adwords for the term "Soffits" or "Shiplap Cladding" etc...

Maybe getting an experienced affiliate with time could trial a campaign for you monitering each keyword if they were provided with the budget to test.

[grahamT]

LOL. I am supposed to be an experienced person

true affiliates I know nothing.

however I have a google adwords campaign running for different keywords, "door canopies" "pvc fencing" etc.

For the keywords I have listed I am getting and ctr of between 25% and 28% which I figure is good ( I think)

Overture is all over the shop and is probably due to different keywords not being specifically targeted with the appropriate display text.

our return on investement is poor because the site is not converting.

as an idea I am spending about £600 per month on ppc this together with organic traffic is totalling for september 3800 visits
there will be some duplication there so lets say 3000 from that there was 10 orders ranging from £100 to £700
so I rekon the conversion is about 0.3% out of this we are still managing to gp50% which is up from 38% which is still more than any of the individual branches aroung the country can manage.

I think the valuable information I have gleaned here regarding site layout, pictures, help files, carriage, and speed of site etc
once implemented should put the conversion ratio I am hoping to at the minimum 1% but 3 or 4 would be nice.

Affiliates I am not so sure about after discusion we are going to be offering more than our competitors, but probably on a tiered system, bit I will probably not allow keword competition bidding on ppc, or masked url redirecting.

as for leakage considering I am also going to populise the fact that there are 17 branches nationwide as to boost consumer confidance it could be argued that there will be loss there if people go straight o the branch, however I thought if you printed out a free carraige certificate to take to the branch that could have the affiliate tracking code on it.

Any ideas.
thanks
Graham

[SillyJokes]

With your site fully optimised and working really well you might expect to make a conversion of 2% maybe a little more. Do the figures still add up if you can achieve this?

I'll be honest with you, the site has a lot of problems with navigation which makes it hard to get around.

Do you know who your market are?

If they are builders they will probably want to get straight to the point in the fastest most efficient way.

If they are domestic you need to give an idiots guide with thorough descriptions of what each thing is an why anyone would want one. In that way you will pick up orders for things people didn't even know they needed upon arrival.

I would seriously advise you to get someone to review your site and show you how you could get it working better. If you did this you would certainly see a return in investment.

At the moment it is not even all that clear what your site does when you arrive. You should have a totally clear strap line (NOT WAFFLE everyone here knows I hate that) that says something like "Long lasting Building Plastics for Trade and DIY"

At the moment you have an animated tick list which if you think about it provides information at your pace, not the customers' and half the time isn't there. It makes it look as if your home page is slow to low, which it isn't.

Anyhow I'm not going to review your site for you. I'm just saying you should seriously think about getting it done.