When it comes to the world of affiliate marketing, there’s one thing that matters: your conversion rate. Of course, you need to be driving traffic to your site to have visitors to convert, but all the visitors in the world won’t matter if none of them convert.
In short, conversion = money in your pocket.
If you’re seeing some results from your affiliate efforts, but not as much as you’d like, you need to improve your conversion rate.
How Do You Calculate Conversion Rate?
Before we look at how you can improve your conversion rate, you need to know what your starting conversion rate is. You may have software or a plugin that analyzes this for you, but if not, the equation is simple:
(Conversions / Total Visitors) * 100% = Your Conversion Rate
For example, if you had 5,000 monthly visitors and 50 conversions, the equation would look like this:
50 divided by 5000 equals 0.01. Times that by 100, and you’ve got 1%.
This calculation can apply to the number of people who purchase a product or convert in another way, such as joining your mailing list.
What is a Good Affiliate Conversion Rate?
A “good” conversion rate varies depending on whom you’re talking to – everyone’s results will vary depending on their industry and product cost. If you’re an affiliate site promoting drones with a $300 – $2,000 price tag, your conversion rate will be naturally lower than another site that sells a $10 product, if all else is equal. Of course, if the former with the lower conversion rate makes more money, the marketer behind the site will still consider it an excellent conversion rate.
Generally, anything from 2 – 5% is considered good for marketers. The average across all industries is 2.35%, and the highest is around 11.4%, so if you’re converting in the double figures, you’re doing exceptionally well.
How Do Affiliate Marketers Get Traffic?
The most successful affiliate marketers consider driving traffic from a wide range of sources. Many of these also help to increase SEO for their sites. Some of the best ways to drive traffic to their affiliate sites and links are:
- Articles – articles attract potential customers and offer them helpful information, and often contain affiliate links
- YouTube Videos – YouTube is another major search engine, and many top affiliates deliver content on the platform as well as on their sites (sometimes instead of websites)
- Paid Advertising – many top affiliate marketers know how to set up ads that catch the right customers at the right time, or drive customers to their site early in the purchasing journey
- Social Media – if your affiliate site is also a brand, you can create social media pages for it; alternatively, create “topic” or “fan” pages that can drive people to your site(s)
- Pinterest – Pinterest isn’t a social media platform; it’s a search engine that drives traffic to websites at a considerable rate; if your products appeal mainly to women, definitely investigate Pinterest (men are on it too, just at a lesser rate)
- Using Content Sites – sites like Quora and Medium can be great places to answer questions and drive traffic to your site; it also helps build authority, which is important for SEO
- Email List – build an email list and deliver them exciting content that drives them back toward your site or affiliate offers; this is a great way to capture people who visited your site at a time when they weren’t ready to purchase but will be later
- SEO – we’ve touched on SEO on many of these points, but the best affiliate marketers make sure they’re following both on-page and off-page SEO best practices on their sites
If you’re looking to increase your conversion rates, you need to diversify how you drive traffic to your site, give them helpful and trustworthy content once they get there (even if it’s just a landing page), and make sure your CTAs land.
Try to resist the temptation to try to drive traffic from all of the sources listed above right away – first, find out where your audience spends time online and get in front of them there. To increase your conversion rate, you have to optimize every part of the equation.