When to ditch your affiliate?

performance issues

[Tonearm]

When do you know it's time to switch affiliate or remove them altogether since they could be interrupting sales on your site? I've sent almost 200 *highly* targeted visitors to my affiliate with only one commissioned sale to show for it. That's a .5% conversion rate with targeted traffic. I'd like to send them an email, but what are they gonna do?

- Grant

[ProHealth]

Grant-

That conversion rate isn't that bad. Most my affiliates have a zero or two after the decimial point. I'd build my program before thinking about dumping people. I'd also look inward at your landing pages... It's all a game of numbers at the end of the day.

[Tonearm]

The thing is, the more attention I divert to my affiliate, the more attention is diverted away from my store. If I'm going to direct people from my retail site to another site, that has to generate a certain amount of revenue to make any sense.

I've been trying to fiddle with affiliates and AdSense over the last week or two to generate additional streams of revenue, but that just doesn't seem to make sense.

I say if you have a good retail thing going, focus on that.

- Grant

[Tonearm]

Oh, I just realized something. I'm talking about links on my site to another site's affiliate program. I should have been more clear.

- Grant

[ShareASale]

Grant - I would agree that if you have a good retail site built, I would spend my time/money making sure my visitors were converting into buyers on my own site...

If you have a good affiliate site that you think is targetted towards your market - you may be better off trying to find another way to fit that into your overall plan... i.e., some kind of cross promotion email, check-out page offer, etc... something that doesn't interfere with your overall sales process on your own site, but still offers you the possibility of earning on a cross promotion basis with your affiliate site.

-Brian

[Tonearm]

Brian,

Nice! I like that a lot. I need to think about that.

- Grant

[hobbnet]

I assume you are already doing target=blank for your affiliate links?

At least this way you wont lose the visitor entirely.

[Tonearm]

Yup I switched to the Transitional XHTML doctype to allow for the target attribute.

- Grant

[Chef_Brian]

It is very important to have some "typical" conversion data to look at before make any decisions. Call up their affiliate manager and ask what type of conversion the pro's are getting and ask what would be a good goal to start with.

As mentioned before it will also depend on how targeted your pages are and how many you have. You can not really look at conversions in the same way. Some of my sites convert around 5 to 8% while others will convert around just less than 1% ... that is a huge spread! It all depends on the product or service, some products or services have a general appeal for "window shopping" for instance.

Think about art affiliate programs .... people love to "look at or view" art. Conversions will be lower in this market place for this reason.

Focus early on building traffic and the sales will come in time.

Cheers,