An Amazon Affiliate Blog

As an Amazon affiliate, it would be possible to know what items are ordered but not which items are ordered together in a single transaction. While this info may not be useful much to small affiliates, in Commission Junction it’s possible to see this info. Today I woke up and pleasantly surprised to see a commission of $154.94 and when I clicked on the link, I saw that there was only one transaction. However, it had 8 items ranging in price from $261.99 to $779.99. The total order amount is $2,437.95. This translates to 6.35%.

My Overstock affiliate fee has been between $30 to $40 a month. This new transaction is going to push the numbers up for this year.

One interesting thing is, in my previous post comments I mentioned how my website traffic is low and I don’t bother to do much SEO and instead focus on CRO (conversion rate optimization). This above transaction proves the point. Here are the stats for yesterday.

Number of clicks: 5
Number of sales: 1

But this is not the interesting detail. Of the 5 clicks, only 2 are from the US. 2 are from Russia and another one is from Philippines. So, it’s 1 out of 2 unique users that resulted in a sale. I will be honest, it’s not a norm but an exception. However, it’s not an exception that happened by chance. Rather it’s due to how I try to increase the conversion rate.

First a bit of digression. What is the safe distance to maintain from the front vehicle when you are driving at 65 mph on the freeway? One of the component that goes into coming up with this safety guidance is the reaction time. As soon as a lot of information is displayed, it takes time to process it. How long is it going to take to browse through 7 or 8 products each displayed with an image and 4 to 5 lines of detail?

Now, one thing I mentioned in the comments section of the previous post is that I look at the keyword with which the user visited my website and then pull information most relevant to that. I don’t advice this idea for most websites. But for a website that is showcasing a product feed from a retailer, this is very desirable. Initially when I setup my affiliate website, I used to get some traffic through Google but realized some of them never translated into clicks. Up on further research, I found out that when the users visited my website, they didn’t find what they were looking for. How can this be possible, that too with Google, you might ask. The reason is, the time lag between crawling and searching. If the search is against a few days old snapshot, but Overstock data feeds are changing on a daily basis, then the following can cause the users to not find what they are looking for

• New products are added and some products are removed from each category. So, a product showing up on 2nd page might move to first or third page. But if the search engine send the user to the 2nd page, they simply eyeball and leave. Even if you provide a search on your own web page, most users don’t have that much patient. They simply go back to Google or other search engine.
• Sometimes the price of the product changes (it may increase or decrease). So, if you have a directory that allows you the users to browse by price, again, the user might be ending up on a page where the product no longer exists because of the change in price.

These are some of the reasons why the products keep moving from page to page. So, it’s not your fault, it’s not the search engines fault and certainly not your retailers . That’s why it’s important to take that extra step and provide the most relevant information to the user. So, what I do is, if I identify a search keyword from the referrer url, then I use that to do the search and present the results to the user. Of course, I also prominently display the internal search box with the keyword I used and the user has the option to change the search options.

Because of this, the users never miss out the information they are looking for. Now the interesting thing is, in the two US clicks I mentioned above, both times the product they are looking for are actually in the same page they landed up. However, the products were in the 7th position on one page and 8th position on the other page. But the time it took for the users to click the link and go to Overstock was 1 second and 3 seconds. Now, I agree that there might be some difference in time recording between my website statistics counter and my click tracking software as they are two different servers. Even then, I can safely assume that the time spent on my website is less than 10 seconds!

As a naive affiliate, I used to think that the longer time the user spends on my website, the more revenue I can make. But that’s not the case. You may be able to make a few extra cents from any advertisements that you place, but you can potentially lose out big on the affiliate revenue.

Most visitors to affiliate income focused websites are there not out of loyalty. They are there to get some more info on the products they are interested in buying (like may be better price, comparison of multiple items, reviews, features etc). And chances are they probably made up their mind on what to buy as well, just want some extra confirmation or information. So, these people are not interested in spending too much time on other websites. They just want what they are looking for. So, had I not done the search based on the keyword they are looking for, they would have to scroll through at least 6 products to find what they are looking for. My search results are organized such that the most relevant products for the search keywords are displayed first. So, if the original page had the product in the 7th position, based on the search, it might show up first or second along with a few more relevant products.

All this required a lot of observation, planning and programming. But as you can see, it is paying me off reasonably. Now I need to find out more ways to increase the conversion rate. If you have any ideas, please feel free to share them in the comments.