40,000 page impressions, 200 clicks, 0 commission

I've been experimenting with CJ.com and having the worse luck with it. I'm very new to affiliate advertising. I'm not sure if I'm promoting affiliates correctly.

The website is http://redhotbrides.com Its a wedding news website. All our traffic is completely targetted. We post fresh contents all the time and ranked a PR3. We get roughly 18k unique visits a month and growing. We also use Adsense ads. The Adsense ads actually generate a decent amount percentage wise to the traffic we get. Can you guys take a look and make some recommendations? We use affiliates that are related to wedding niche only. We use the affiliate banner ads and text links. Should we be using a shopping cart software and linking to direct affiliate products that's relevant to our audience?

 

200 clicks isnt THAT much. It seems you still should make a couple sales. Everything on the site looks a little cluttered... maybe a redesign...

 

I agree. Red Hot Bride site is quite cluttered. There are too many pictures in the front page. To increase the number of clicks in your site, simplify your webpage.

 

maybe a little less text?

 

Is it really that cluttered? This is kind of the format of news publication website uses. Do you guys think I have too many ads on each page? I don't want to give the impression that's all we care about is generating revenues from ads. I will remove a couple of items on the main page.

Besides the front page layout clutter, is there anything else?

 

My first thought when loading the site was WOW pictures, anyone still on dial up is going to leave.

I would actually consider adding more text and making the images smaller if you really want to keep them all. People check out websites because of the information, not the pictures. Also try changing your site so that you don't have to scroll to the right to see more of it. I have a wide screen and I still have to scroll. Anything on the right is wasted advertising.

 

I went through and shrunk some files down. It should help a bit now in terms of amount of bytes being downloaded. I'm surprise you have to scroll to the right on a wide screen. The site is designed for 1024x768 or higher resolution. If you have smaller resolution, then yes some horizontal scrolling. if you are on dialup, then yes its going to be a slow experience but this is a photo stimulating website along with articles.

We are now up to 51000 Impressions since I posted and gained 20+ clicks. No conversion still.

Sales: 0

Maybe we need different affiliates? Right now we are promoting heavily with The Knot and House of Brides affiliates which we think our audience/visitors should be interested in. We are going to run with them for a bit longer to see any results. Any suggestions are welcomed.

 

you should get 4k impressions, 200 clicks then you will get sales. In other words - targetted traffic.

 

I'll have to agree with what others have said. The site looks like Hurricane Katrina rolled through it. It needs to be more organized and simplified. I wouldn't be surprised if your 200 clicks were from people just trying to click away from your site. LOL Just kidding

Pictures are fine, but it has to be organized in a more logical manner, rather than having everything just "thrown up" the way it looks now.

That may or may not help your conversions, but it should improve your site over-all and result in a higher retention rate (visitors staying on your site longer and more return visitors) which could mean more clicks.

Also, you should try testing different affiliate offers. You stated that you think your visitors should like your aff offers, but why not try different ones and see if it helps your conversion rate? Let the customers decide.

 

Hi Tommy Glauning I liked the pictures of the website but I think you should take at least half of them from the Home page and put them on other pages, it makes me give up on reading the information you have there, and definitely I don't like to scroll to the right to see the rest of your website, just put more text and take away some pictures and it will be a lot better, good luck!

Ed.

 

The site is very very very cluttered.
A basic down to earth homepage would increase your click throughs,
and may increase the sales with your affiliate networks.

Also your site is off center, you should fix that.

Another thing I noticed is that you have alot of flash embed on your homepage.
One thing that I hate when going to a website is having to let the flash applets and Java applets
load. You might want to consider taking those off, and leaving it for subpages.

 

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. We have removed some ads here and there. We removed the video on the front page and replaced it with more text links to our contents/articles. However we did add a pop under in the main front page.

The numbers are getting worse. We now have generated over 1000 clicks and have 80,000+ impressions and ZERO conversion since I posted this. What am I doing wrong?? The CTR is 25% on the popular products. I know our audience likes the direct product data feed but sales are not converting. There's still some technical issues of the site being off centered and not optimized if you are on 1024x768 resolution, but I don't that its that detrimental in causing 0 sales conversion.

On the bright side, google adsense are converting well. Makes me want to switch all to google adsense but I know all our visitors are targetted so affiliates should do better. I have sent an email to CJ asking why my clicks are not converting questioning if the affiliates are playing fair. I have contact all the affiliates and they've been very responsive and provided some suggestions. In the meantime, we're starting to focus on producing more contents and a mini marketing campaign with google adwords. Please hellp.

 

this is mainly due to the psychology of your "long tail keywords". all your organic traffic do not seem to be liking to buy stuff. try new keywords and changing ads up

 

I had a similar experience trying to monetize some pages on my blog that were getting lots of traffic. lots of clicks and no conversions. All was targeted, and I ended up putting an Adsense strip in its place. At least that pulls in 15 bucks a month...

 

We are so far extremely disappointed. Since posting this and adding many changes/contents, we been generating 200+ clicks a day on the affiliate ads but still ZERO conversation. We find the afilliates we pick to be reasonable and name brands that I would purchase from personally and others should have no problem, but still nobody is buying. We are going to run with this for a whole month if we can't convert a single sale, we'll just simply drop all the affiliate ads.

 

Put adsense as for now then, it looks really something they don't like in advertisers or bad keywords.

 

I think it's the economy and the niche you are in. Don't worry, the same thing happen to me pretty much. I launched a site a couple of months ago with all the traffic coming from organic search. Over 400 clicks later, no CJ conversions.
Crazy, huh. Just sell links privately since you got the Pagerank and use adsense. That should net you something.

 

Dear after reading through the post i realized that DP is very good everyones treating your problem as there only. But the most disappointing thing i found on the website was your blog.

After reading Kerosene's post i realized you have a blog, then i again went through your website still could not find the blog link. then came back to his post and saw this guy has posted the link also.. Trust me your website is very difficult to stay i had to force myself try making it more simpler rather than so many graphics and try and e-commerce software will be a very good idea.

Regards

I hope you make a lot of money.