Affiliate Chronicle
Understanding and Maximising your Inventory
In this chronicle we focus on how you can get the most out of your partnerships and your inventory ? both from a financial and content perspective. Below, we present you with the most important considerations.
- Conversion Rates and Payments
Creating results for the advertiser obviously ranks your website high in the advertisers? awareness, and you will have a strong position in the network. Therefore, to be successful you need to optimise your web site to ensure that you are creating results for all the advertisers you work with, thereby also creating maximum revenues for yourself.
At the end of the month, you will always evaluate how much money you have made. In general, the two most advantageous ways to evaluate this are the Total income and Earnings Per Click reports. When evaluating whether to go for programs paying commissions for clicks, leads and sales, many affiliates make the common mistake of only choosing the click deals. Through a proper evaluation of programs using the metrics total income and/or Earnings Per Click. EPC it is simple to see the effectiveness of each program.
Here is an example:
(100 clicks - 0 income, 4 leads - ? 12 income, 1 sale - ? 8 income) = ? 20 EPC: ? 20/100 clicks = ? 0,2/ click
In this example, the web site gets paid ? 3/lead and ? 8/sale. The lead rate is 4% and the sales rate is 1%, which must be considered very reasonable conversion rates to work with. And the resulting EPC is ? 0,2
When you log on to the system and choose the EPC report, you will be able to see the exact EPC for the programs you are working with.
- Categorise your Web site
When you evaluate the effectiveness of your site, you will quickly discover that various places on your web site convert better than others, and how different areas are more successful for certain types of products and advertisers. To optimise this you should divide your inventory into two general categories, commercial and editorial.
The commercial areas are those you generally use for banner ads. Whilst taking into account an advertisers? EPC ratio, you should of course choose the advertiser according to the category of your site, that being sports, travel, finance etc. As a result you will work with both the most relevant advertisers and those that generate the highest EPC. In addition you could also use Tradedoubler?s pooling system that automatically optimises your EPC.
Furthermore, you have the opportunity to build integrated shops on your website for selected partners. When you identify an advertiser, which matches the profile of your website you believe your visitors will benefit from, you should build a shop with specific products. This will ensure that you do not cannibalise your existing inventory but rather increase your inventory. Tradedoubler?s product feed functionality and the advertisers content generators will provide you with a good quality and simple way of creating these shops in your website. These solutions are known to have high conversion rates and thus attractive EPC.
When you start integrating your advertisers further into your website via shops, text links, product links etc, you utilise your inventory to a higher degree, and you can benefit from the quality and relevance of your editorial content. However, never jeopardise your editorial approach.
Finally, and of course this doesn?t happen by itself, armed with the statistics provided by Tradedoubler you should have every opportunity to improve your earnings from week to week!
Simon Goldschmidt
Tradedoubler, Denmark
If you have comments on this column send a mail to support.
Chronicle archive
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In this chronicle we focus on how you can get the most out of your partnerships and your inventory ? both from a financial and content perspective. Below, we present you with the most important considerations.
- Conversion Rates and Payments
Creating results for the advertiser obviously ranks your website high in the advertisers? awareness, and you will have a strong position in the network. Therefore, to be successful you need to optimise your web site to ensure that you are creating results for all the advertisers you work with, thereby also creating maximum revenues for yourself.
At the end of the month, you will always evaluate how much money you have made. In general, the two most advantageous ways to evaluate this are the Total income and Earnings Per Click reports. When evaluating whether to go for programs paying commissions for clicks, leads and sales, many affiliates make the common mistake of only choosing the click deals. Through a proper evaluation of programs using the metrics total income and/or Earnings Per Click. EPC it is simple to see the effectiveness of each program.
Here is an example:
(100 clicks - 0 income, 4 leads - ? 12 income, 1 sale - ? 8 income) = ? 20 EPC: ? 20/100 clicks = ? 0,2/ click
In this example, the web site gets paid ? 3/lead and ? 8/sale. The lead rate is 4% and the sales rate is 1%, which must be considered very reasonable conversion rates to work with. And the resulting EPC is ? 0,2
When you log on to the system and choose the EPC report, you will be able to see the exact EPC for the programs you are working with.
- Categorise your Web site
When you evaluate the effectiveness of your site, you will quickly discover that various places on your web site convert better than others, and how different areas are more successful for certain types of products and advertisers. To optimise this you should divide your inventory into two general categories, commercial and editorial.
The commercial areas are those you generally use for banner ads. Whilst taking into account an advertisers? EPC ratio, you should of course choose the advertiser according to the category of your site, that being sports, travel, finance etc. As a result you will work with both the most relevant advertisers and those that generate the highest EPC. In addition you could also use Tradedoubler?s pooling system that automatically optimises your EPC.
Furthermore, you have the opportunity to build integrated shops on your website for selected partners. When you identify an advertiser, which matches the profile of your website you believe your visitors will benefit from, you should build a shop with specific products. This will ensure that you do not cannibalise your existing inventory but rather increase your inventory. Tradedoubler?s product feed functionality and the advertisers content generators will provide you with a good quality and simple way of creating these shops in your website. These solutions are known to have high conversion rates and thus attractive EPC.
When you start integrating your advertisers further into your website via shops, text links, product links etc, you utilise your inventory to a higher degree, and you can benefit from the quality and relevance of your editorial content. However, never jeopardise your editorial approach.
Finally, and of course this doesn?t happen by itself, armed with the statistics provided by Tradedoubler you should have every opportunity to improve your earnings from week to week!
Simon Goldschmidt
Tradedoubler, Denmark
If you have comments on this column send a mail to support.
Chronicle archive
Back
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