AssociatePrograms.com

Warburton

I first came to this forum in the middle of November with great scepticism about affiliate marketing. Debs and Charlie were very helpful, so I must thank you both again. I still feel very new to this, though!

Two months down the line, I have signed up for a couple of programmes (mostly through affiliate networks like CJ, but one independently) and - rather to my surprise - made just over $145. Not great, but not nearly as low as I was expecting.

Unfortunately, I don't have much of a perspective of how well or badly I'm doing. With one of my affiliate programmes I am referring a converting customer every three days on average. Is that good? Or is that dismal? (okay, yes I know it depends on the product/service etc. ... but, in general?)

Obviously commission rates aren't very high for the products I'm linking to, because $145 doesn't seem much for eight weeks, so how often would I have to refer converting customers before I contact the merchant and negotiate a higher commission? Should I be referring one customer a day or should it be five or ten?

Of course, I understand, that everything depends on topic and industry and so on, but I'm looking for ranges here, not necessarily precise answers.

Thank you all in advance.

Guest · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 4:03 am Post subject:

Do you know how many customers you are getting versus how many are buying? For example, is it 1 customer out of every ? One sale every three days doesn't really tell us very much because we don't know how much traffic you are getting in that 3 days.

Warburton · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 4:17 am Post subject:

Thanks. You'll have to forgive me... I'm really quite slow on all this stuff Confused

Does it matter how many visitors I get? Is conversion rate important to merchants? If I send 10 converting customers to a merchant every day, what does it matter if that's ten percent of my traffic or one percent?

Is it something to do with their server load? Are merchants more likely to reward affiliates who produce lower numbers of converting customers bt have a higher conversion percentage? Or are they more bothered about numbers of sales per day rather than conversion rate per se?

Guest · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 4:38 am Post subject:

I was thinking along the lines of how much traffic you are receiving. If, in three days you are receiving 3,000 visitors but only one sale, the merchant may not be a very good converting one or your site may not be preselling very well or it may not be targeted very well.

On the other hand, if your site is receiving 100 visitors in three days and one of them makes a purchase, that's a decent conversion rate. If this is the case, you just need to figure out how to increase your traffic.

Since we don't know how much traffic you receive in 3 days we don't really know how to help. If you are only receiving 10 visitors in 3 days (like my site Sad

) yet still make a sale with only 10 visitors, that's not too bad.

Warburton · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 5:18 am Post subject:

Ah... I see what you're driving at.

I'm not really asking how to increase my conversion rate or traffic or CTR - I can easily experiment with that. I'm merely asking how many converting customers should I be sending to a merchant per day before I approach the merchant in order to negotiate a higher commission rate...?

I suspect - though I'm not certain - that the conversion rate is of less interest to the merchant than the publisher because given:

Site A sends 1000 visitors a day and 10 convert
Site B sends 100 visitors a day and 4 convert

it strikes me as unlikely that the merchant will look more favourably on Site B (despite its 4x better conversion rate). Am I wrong about this?

Is there a possibility that a merchant might say... okay well you're referring x number of sales to us a day, but you're sending us so much traffic in order to achieve this that it's taking a toll on our servers, so we're not prepared to negotiate with you at present. That's a most unlikely scenario, isn't it?

Debs · **Joined**: 16 Aug 2003 **Posts**: 4296 **Location**: NY

The amount of traffic you are receiving is less important than the amount of traffic you are sending to the merchant.

If you are sending loads of traffic, and the merchant isn't converting ... don't contact the merchant ... find a different one. Wink

If they can't convert what you do send, you can suggest to them that the problem lies within their site, hoping they will take the time to improve their site and conversion. After all, it is in their best interests to do so. But I wouldn't hold my breath while they do it. Wink

As far as contacting the merchant to increase your % ... I would think you would need to send hundreds per day, if not thousands. The idea being they would feel the loss if you left. They won't feel it at just a few visitors a day.

Again, if the merchant wasn't converting ... I wouldn't ask for increased commissions since a higher % of 0 is still 0 ... I would look for a better converting merchant.

Debs
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Warburton · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 2:55 pm Post subject:

Warburton · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 7:53 pm Post subject:

You know after re-reading this thread, it's very interesting to me. You're both coming at it from the angle: "Is the merchant a good merchant for my site? (And if not where can I find a better merchant...?)" whereas I'm coming at it from the angle: "Am I a high-performing affiliate for the merchant? (And if not I'll experiment some more with my design...)".

I'm not sure what that reveals Confused

Guest · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 8:08 pm Post subject:

I think Debs and I meant the same thing, we just came from different angles. Very Happy

After reading your last post, I don't have an answer. If I were to "guess" I wouldn't think one sale every three days, or 10 sales a month on average, would be enough to ask for a higher commission rate or to consider yourself a high performing affiliate. But you never really know unless you ask the merchant, which is what I would do.

AllanGardyne · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 10:31 pm Post subject:

There are two basic ways to calculate your commissions: the merchant's conversion rate, and earnings per click. It's helpful to know both.

If 1 person out of every 100 you send to the merchant buys something, the merchant has a 1% conversion rate - or does with the traffic from YOUR site. All traffic isn't equal.

If the merchant with a conversion rate of 1% is paying you a commission of $65 per sale, that means you're earning 6.5 cents for every visitor you send to the merchant.

Why do you want to go to the trouble of figuring that out? Because you have a finite number of visitors to send anywhere. One merchant might pay you an average of 6.5 cents per visitor while another one pays you only 0.5 cents per visitor, or less.

If you promote lifetime programs or residual income programs - such as those reviewed at http://www.LifetimeCommissions.com - the sums get complicated. You have to make your own guesses what the real income will be over two or three years - or more if you're optimisitic about the future.

When can you ask for a higher commission? Any time. There's no harm in asking. Smile

However, be aware that some affiliates are earning thousands of dollars a month from some merchants. If you're rejected, you could ask what you have to do to deserve a higher rate.

Some merchants may reward you in other ways, such as by giving your site valuable publicity.

There are no hard and fast rules. Some merchants will ignore you forever. Some will pay you a higher commission rate without even being asked.
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Allan Gardyne
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Warburton · Posted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 11:29 pm Post subject:

Thank you Allan. It's a lot to get used to and think about when everything's realatively new and I'm only now starting to get my head around all the different statistics from CTR to CR and everything else. (Before November all I ever had to worry about was CPM and CPC!!).

One thing that particularly confused me was the result I was getting for EPC at Commission Junction which I had assumed was "Earnings per Click" though the numbers didn't tie up. Now I find out that it is "Earnings per Century" (or something similar) which translates as how much you can expect to earn from a given merchant for every hundred clicks you send in their direction... this is actually a very useful stat to know. By comparing my personal EPC on one of my programmes to the average network EPC for the same programme, it was evident that I have a conversion rate some ten times lower than average... which gave me some sort of perspective of how much ground I have to make up.

However, as I said further up the thread, I'm not too concerned about conversion rate for now, only how many converting customers I'm sending a day. Right now, if I send 200 customers and 3 convert, that makes me happier than sending 100 customers and only having 2 convert.

At any rate, I must be doing something right by asking you guys questions because today I made two sales on one programme, another three sales on another and one more sale on a third - that's the best day I've seen yet!