Quick Answer: A conversion rate in affiliate marketing means the ratio between the number of visitors landing on a sales page through your affiliate link vs. the number of sales. Conversion rates are generally shown in %.
If you are an affiliate marketer, you have probably heard the term conversion rate before but maybe you don’t know what it means.
Everyone’s heard of click-through rates – that number that tells you how many people click your affiliate link and buy. However, it’s hard to know what those numbers mean – after all, if you have a high CTR and low conversions, you can still earn commissions online.
So let’s walk through it together step by step.
What Exactly Is A Conversion Rate?
The conversion rate accurately shows how well your marketing campaign is doing. It’s the percentage of people who saw your link and bought something. It lets you know precisely how effective your campaign is in how many people are taking action.
Conversion rates are a measure of how many people who visit a website end up taking some action. For example, on an eCommerce site, this could be adding something to their cart or checking out.
On a blog, this might be signing up for the email newsletter or sharing the post on social media. A service-based website might be filling out a contact form or setting up an account.
The conversion rate is often expressed as a percentage ranging from 0% to 100%. It’s calculated by taking the total number of conversions (e.g., email subscribers) and dividing it by the total number of unique visitors over a given timeframe, such as 30 days or 90 days.
How to Calculate Conversion Rate: A Practical Example
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that take a specific action, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form.
Affiliate marketing usually refers to sales generated by ads and links on your site.
A high conversion rate is one of the ways you can measure the effectiveness of your tactics and strategies. It indicates that people are responding to your ads and links.
This is very important if you have an online store because it tells you how many people view your products and then buy them.
If you sell products through affiliate programs, the conversion rate is a way to make sure you’re getting paid for all the sales that come from ads on your site.
Multiply the number of sales by 100 (the total number of sales). Divide this number by the total number of visitors who saw your ad or link. If you don’t have this information, use page views instead. The resulting figure is what most experts consider to be a reasonable conversion rate for an online store or affiliate program.
Suppose 5000 visitors see your affiliate advertisement and 250 viewers click on the ad or your referral link.
So the Click Through Rate (CTR) in this case is (250×100)/5000=5%.
In simple words, 5% of the ad viewers showed interest in the product or service.
Now we see how many of those 250 interested visitors clicked the Call to Action (CTA) on the merchant’s website. Suppose, 20 out of 250 clicked the CTA button.
Now the Conversion Rate is (20×100)/250=8%.
How Can Affiliate Marketers Increase Conversion Rates?
Conversion rate is sometimes confused with the Click Through Rate (CTR). They are linked to each other but are entirely distinct factors.
CTR is the percentage of people who have seen your ads, clicked on them, and landed on the landing page. This could be a webpage you’ve designed to send interested prospects or a page your affiliate manager has created with links and banners to send people through to the final sale page.
Start by setting a goal of what conversion rate you’d like to achieve, and keep in mind that different industries have different averages. For example, if you’re selling business software, your conversion rate goals might be higher than if you’re selling beauty products.
At the end of each month, look at your number next to clicks vs. conversions and do some analysis about what factors affected your conversion rates for that month. This will help you determine which kinds of ads were most effective for driving traffic to sales pages or which kinds of ads get clicked on most frequently but don’t drive many sales.
Keeping track of this information throughout the year will help you make smarter decisions about what ad strategies work best for each product line or product.
Learn From Super Affiliates
The best way to increase your conversion rate is to learn from those who are already successful.
At Commission Academy, we have a free step-by-step training course on how to ensure you make the most commissions possible, even if you’re a complete beginner.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
While each of these aspects will be tackled in more detail later, what is important to remember is that your goal should be to increase your conversion rate by improving the user experience for your visitors and customers.
For example, if you’re an eCommerce site, it’s good to make sure that your site is mobile-friendly so that anyone using a mobile device or tablet can easily browse around and purchase something.
It’s also essential to have a strong call-to-action so that people know what you want them to do once they get to your site – whether register as a member or sign up for your newsletter, place an order or buy a product featured on your website.
If you’re running an affiliate website, it is equally important to provide helpful information about the products you are promoting and create quality content that will keep readers engaged and encourage them to convert into customers.
Comparison Of Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is one of the most critical metrics in affiliate marketing.
It’s the ratio between the number of people who clicked a link and the total number of people who visited your site. In other words, it measures how many people have taken the action you want them to take after visiting your page.
We compare conversion rates to other affiliates’ conversion rates to determine which offers to convert well and which ones don’t.
We also compare our conversion rates from month to month, or even day to day, to see if we’re making progress over time. The metric is so vital that some affiliates will run a campaign only if they can get their conversion rate above a certain threshold.
Because of its importance, you must understand a conversion rate to interpret its numbers correctly.
Suppose you don’t know what your conversion rate means. In that case, you’re likely unaware that your conversion rate is higher than it should be— and you’re missing out on how much you could earn.
Traffic Generation
The most important way to improve your conversion rate is through more traffic generation.
You can have the best offer on the market, but if no one sees it, you won’t make a sale. There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, and each method will vary depending on your offer and your target audience.
For example, if you’re promoting products for kids, your audience would be parents, so you might want to focus on social media sites that parents frequent.
If you’re promoting weight loss affiliate programs, you might want to promote them on forums where people ask questions about dieting and exercise.
Whatever you choose, remember that quality traffic is better than quantity!
Set a budget that’s reasonable for how much profit you want to generate per day and work within those limits.
For example, if you want $100/day in sales, set up Google AdWords campaigns so that you spend $50/day on each one instead of setting up ten ad campaigns for $10/day each.
You’ll get more conversions with fewer ads overall because the ones you have will be able to focus all their attention on this niche audience.
Marketing Funnel
It’s important to realize that conversion rate is measured differently on different websites. Some focus on getting visitors to put in their email addresses, while others want to see purchases or visits to other websites (these are called “outcomes” by industry professionals).
In this blog post, we’ll talk about conversion rate and ways to improve it as it relates specifically to affiliate marketing. To begin, let’s define and understand what conversion rate means.
The most widely-accepted definition of conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who have taken the action you want them to take on your website.
For example, if you promote music affiliate programs, one of your goals might be for people visiting your website to buy a song.
You could then measure your website’s conversion rate by looking at the number of purchases made by all of the people who visited your site, divided by the total number of unique visitors during a specific period—say, a month.
Product Or Service Relevance
This one is HUGE. It’s essential to find products that relate to your audience.
You can promote as many products as you like, but be sure to find products that your readers want to buy.
Include Social Proof
Showing people how many others have purchased your product or service can be a powerful way to convince them that they should too.
One example is allowing users to see the number of people who have already downloaded your eBook; showing testimonials or social media shares can be another.
Including these things allows potential customers to have a more concrete idea of what they’re getting into—and if they see that their friends are already involved with you, they’ll be more likely to do so themselves!
4 Factors That Affect Affiliate’s Conversion Rates
Some of the most common factors that can affect your conversion rate are:
1. Product Quality
How useful and relevant it is to users. This is where you have to focus on providing an exceptional product or service.
2. Traffic Source
depending on your niche, some sources of traffic may convert better than others. For example, in affiliate marketing, email lists are great for conversion rates because they’re a targeted audience who opted in to hear from you.
3. Brand Trust
If people don’t know you, they won’t purchase from you. That’s why building a following is essential before you start selling something.
4. Real-Life Benefit To The End User
People need to feel like they’re getting a good deal. If they think they’re paying too much, they’ll shop around. Just remember that price isn’t everything. You can create incredible value without charging premium prices.
And I see so many affiliates missing out on sales by talking about the features of a product instead of focusing on the real-world benefits of the products to the user.
Point out how the product you’re promoting will solve a problem or relieve a pain point of theirs and you’ll see your conversion rates soar!
Affiliate Marketing Conversion Rates: The Bottom Line
Conversion rate is a term borrowed from the world of e-commerce, but it also has relevance for affiliate marketers. It refers to the percentage of website visitors who purchase after clicking on an ad or other call-to-action. If you’ve seen an advertisement and then immediately visited the advertiser’s site and purchased something, you’ve experienced an exceptionally high conversion rate.
What goes into a conversion rate?
This depends on what kind of conversion we’re talking about. If we’re talking about a sale, we’re talking about things like the site’s layout and design, copy, images, and checkout process—anything that might persuade us to purchase.
The conversion rate is also affected by things like your offer’s value:
If you send people to a site that offers $500 in prizes for only $50 in registration fees—a profoundly good deal—your conversion rate is likely to be much higher than if people were going to register for less valuable prizes.
The most critical factor influencing conversion rates is trustworthiness—if people don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you no matter what else they might have liked about your offer.
