CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION: BACK TO BASICS

One of the skills that an affiliate needs to be proficient in if he wants to succeed in this industry is optimization. You can’t keep sending traffic to your offer or your squeeze page and just hope that one or a few of them convert.

A skilled affiliate can see through the performance of his marketing campaigns and can improve these to attain maximum revenue. However, this skill is not easily attained. Not only do you need to research about the different techniques, but you also need to test them yourself. The best way to learn is through hands-on experience, after all.

What is Conversion Rate?

Conversion rate is the percentage of conversions you attained for a specific amount of traffic you receive. For instance, if you receive 2,000 views and achieved 10 conversions, your conversion rate will be computed as follows:

102,000 = 0.005

0.005 x 100 = 0.5%

This means only 0.5% of your traffic drove conversions.

There are a lot of industry averages when it comes to conversion rates. The most recent and most highly regarded one is Unbounce 2020 Conversion Rate Benchmark Report. This report allows you to compare what you’re getting to your industry’s average.

How to Optimize for Conversion Rate

There are a hundred different techniques to boost your conversion rate, but you can only do that if you know the basic steps. These are:

1. Assess your current marketing campaigns.

You have to know what you want to improve, after all. The goal is to make your campaigns perform better. Dig deeper into your tracking platform and look into the different aspects of your conversion.

Did they come from a single traffic source? What time was the conversion? Where there any similarities in the device types used by the visitors that converted?

The point is, you need to find the similarities in the conversions you received. This will become your starting point. If there are absolutely no similarities between the conversions, then you have not tested your campaigns enough.

If the conversion rate is very low amidst high traffic, have a look at which sources are driving the most traffic, and pause it. You never know when a handful of sources are sending all the traffic and not giving other sources a chance. If the traffic is evenly distributed among the sources, then it might be time to stop the campaign.

2. Evaluate your Landing Page

Your conversion rate depends a lot on your landing page. This means you have to make sure you’re doing it correctly.

Does the flow of your page lead to the sign-up form, or the subscription, or whatever action you want your visitors to take? Is there any barrier to entry? Is your landing page convincing enough to entice them to sign up or to click on the button towards the offer page?

Have a look at your landing page’s analytics. How long does the visitor stay on your page? How many of them leave immediately? If you can, install a heatmap and see what part of your landing page your viewers are clicking on.

3. Split-Test Your Campaigns

Test, test, and test. These are the top three must-do’s when running a marketing campaign. It is rare for one campaign to be successful at the onset; you have to try different things, compare their individual performances, and scale based on the best performing sets.

There are different parts of your campaign that need testing, which include:

• Audience demographics (location, age, device usage);
• Landing page and its elements;
• Having a squeeze page versus sending directly to the offer page
• Ad creatives (including ad headline, image, and additional text);
• Source and/or keyword targeting.

Start Optimizing

When should you start optimizing? Ideally, you should look into your campaign as soon as it reached a specific traffic level or once it has spent a specific budget amount. There’s no point in optimizing if there’s not enough traffic as there won't be enough data to analyze.

Even if you just scraped your ad creatives and landing pages from spy tools (such as ours) assuming they will perform well, you need to optimize your campaigns to ensure they bring you the profit level you expect.