Improving click through?

How to.

[Truck]

I just found this site the other day I wish I had found it a year ago it would have saved me a lot of heart trouble. I have a pretty successful web site it is doing well in the SE (number one in Google and Yahoo for my key words). My question is I have an affiliate banner (and word text) on my web site and out of my daily visitors it gets clicked on average 7.21 times and out of that 6.13 actually ends up buy the product is this average? Any suggestions on how to improve my click through would be appreciated.

[Brett_Tabke]

Welcome to the board Truck. The 7 depends on your total traffic of course. If you are doing 8 hits a day, then 7 clicks is excellet (lol). If you are doing a million a day, then I'd suggest rewritting the ad. The 6 of 7 figure is awesome. Most folks dream of 10% ctb (click-to-buy) ratios and live well with 1-3% ratios.

[Truck]

Thanks. The 7.21 and the 6.13 are percentage not the number of clicks.

[uk_dokey]

truck do you mean that out of 7% click thru 6% of that 7% buy? Or 6% buy out of your total traffic?

[4crests]

I might be wrong, but I think TRUCK is trying to say that out of 1,000 impressions, he gets 72 hits. And out of those 72 hits, 4.4 people actually place an order.

[Truck]

7% of my vistors click on my affiliate link and 6% of those 7% buy. I hope this clears it up. Thank you.

[TallTroll]

Following the numbers through I make it 100 * 7%=7, 7 * 6%=0.42, so for every 100 visitors you make 0.42 sales. Assuming an average sales value of $100, that makes 42c per vistor, which I would have thought was pretty good (depending on what market sector you are in), and even an average sale of just $50 leaves you with a revenue/visitor figure of over 20c

As Brett pointed out, 10% click-to-buy is a near unobtainable ideal, and your 6.13% sounds pretty good to me. Similarly, a 7% visitor-to-click rate is pretty good. I would expect a banner ad to do less than 1% these days (unless you have an AMAZINGLY targetted ad space), so you must be doing a lot right already

Can you track what keyword/phrase is associated with a given visitor, and then track that through to a buy/no buy decision? If so, then identify the words/phrases that have the highest %age of purchasers, and try to hit those keywords harder.

Alternatively, maybe try creating some alternative versions of your banner, and try them out for a week or so each. See which ones do well, and try to work out why. Play with different wording, different layout, different colours. You never know, you may find the magical mix that gets it just right (but bear in mind, you may be pretty close to that already)

[JamesR]

I am becoming increasingly aware of the emotional aspect of buying. People are, for the most part, emotional and not rational buyers. Therefore, if you can appeal to a felt need and eliminate the nature guilt of spending money, you will increase your sales greatly. Your text and banner ad should cater to your visitors desires.