Hello all, I'll try to keep this simple. I recently switched over to Amazon affiliates. My site gets 99% organic traffic - all targeted to my main theme which is a product type (ie. desks). I have used pictures from Amazon and created "product pages" on it. For the past 5 days, I have sent 70 unique visitors to Amazon and even though they are all being tracked (as in I see that amazon recorded the product clicks), I noticed that I have yet to see any ordered items. Just to specify - I am not talking about earnings... I know that the items need to be shipped for any earnings to show.. I am referring to Ordered Items in the Orders report which should be instant.. Unless if it shouldn't. I haven't used Amazon Affiliates before, so I don't know how this works, but I find it hard to believe that I've made absolutely no sales yet, mainly because of the way that my site is structured. It's very direct, and it has actual product pages. On those product pages, there is an image of the product, some information about it, pricing info, and a link that says "Buy from Amazon" and the clicks came from that link, so people were on their way to actually "buy from Amazon". In other words, I try to actually "sell" the product before the visitors even get to the respective Amazon page. I am obviously not saying that I expected a 100% conversion or anything close to that, but 0 out of 70 of that type of clicks seems weird to me. Now, I know that there is a 24 hour delay in the clicks reporting... I am hoping that you would just tell me that there is a bigger delay in the order reporting. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
There's no "bigger" (longer?) delays with orders. When your stats update, any orders for the previous day should appear as well. As you already know, it's different with earnings but there's really not much space to play around with orders. Either you nail them within the 24 hour period or not. 2 days would theoretically be the maximum time frame before seeing one (placing an order a couple of hours after the stats update for the previous day for example) but since you say it's been 5 days I would have to agree with you when you say that you haven't made a sale yet. The only other possibility includes someone adding an item to their "cart" and then leaving it like that for a while. I think there's something like a 90 day time frame to nail that sale before it completely "disappears" from your record. But that's not an order until it's an order. Seriously, 70 clicks is not much. I can imagine at least something being sold but perhaps your traffic is not targeted as you think? How about commerciality? Are there tons of advertisers competing for the search terms you've been targeting? What do you use to track the traffic? Do we even agree on defining "organic traffic"? I always aim for US laser targeted search traffic. How about you? There's really no rules with amazon. Any scenario is possible as far as people buying online is concerned. If you're uncomfortable with sharing more details such as traffic screenshots, search stats and anything else, hit me up in private and I'll take a look. I have more sites monetized via amazon than anything else and I'm just about to make a hell of a lot more.
Are you seeing the clicks in your Amazon report? If you are, then your tracking id is working and that is not the problem. There is a 90 day cookie once the user adds to cart, as Aleksandar says, so keep that in mind. The clicks reported by Amazon are also quite "crude". I can't be sure, but I expect that they track "clicks" from search engine spiders, bots, yourself etc. So if you did a bit of testing and your site is crawled by a few bots that could explain a lot of the clicks. That being said.. number one is to check your affiliate id is working and your links are setup properly.
fresh - thanks for your input. Yes, I am certain that the tracking id is working because I see the clicks tracked in 3 different places, one of which is amazon. Aleksandar, thank you so much for your detailed reply! Like you said, it's been a few days, so I can be almost certain that there are no sales. Now, about the "adding to cart" situation... I don't know. I guess it could be the case, but it still sounds a little weird to me. About my traffic - while I will not get super specific, I have no problem getting really close to that, so I'll give you an idea of the traffic and the theme. Image a site about white beds. I get close to 99% my traffic from Google for terms like white beds, white beds for sale, cheap white beds, queen size white beds, white beds online etc etc. In my imaginary example, you can safely assume that "white beds" gets a LOT of advertisers. You can further assume that my traffic is 90% from the US. Wouldn't you agree that this is the best type of traffic one can get? Also, I recently redesigned my site to make it seem as if it was an e-commerce site, with actual product pages, which show pictures together with prices for the products and include a "Buy from Amazon" image link. The visitors clicking on that image link are going straight to the actual product page on Amazon. So, out of that kind of targeted and organic traffic, and out of the people who actually visited a product page on my site, saw an image of the product, saw the price of that product, and decided to take action and actually click on the link that clearly states "Buy from Amazon", what kind of conversion rate would you expect. In my opinion, it should be close to 10% or more. But then again, I have never tried this before so I could be wrong. It just seems like a lot of steps taken from the visitors which, in my opinion, shows that they are "sold" on the product. I would have been fine if I had made 1 sale - but so far I haven't made none... and that seems really weird to me. Am I wrong? Now, one thing that I have considered is that maybe people don't buy beds (or other bulky furniture) from Amazon... I mean, the best sellers in the category of my product have about 20-30 reviews, while the top sellers in electronics or books may have 100s of them which definitely shows that they are not nearly as popular, but still.... Lastly, something very interesting happened yesterday. I actually made 2 sales. The funny part? They were not for the products I am "selling". They were not even for products even remotely related to the type of products that I selling. More specifically, instead of selling a bed, I sold 2 books. I guess it's a good thing because I finally saw a sale, but it makes me wonder... P.S. The way I generated my links was by visiting a product while logged into my account, and clicking on "get link". I then copied JUST the "href" part of the generated html of the product. I am merely mentioning that just in case it matters... These links seem to be working fine, since all the items that I am "selling" are showing on the "Items with NO orders" section. Any other ideas?
The nice thing is that if you send them to Amazon and they decide to have a wander around, anything they purchase (in this case, books), will be credited to you. Affiliate selling always has a low turnover, so zero out of seventy is not unusual. Yes, it may be discouraging, but it's not a surprise, either.
No problem at all! I don't think it's common, but I guess it does happen occasionally. Yes I would. That's exactly what I'm doing as well. Niche sites with as much US traffic as possible. Commerciality is very important. I've tried amazon with a lot of different combinations and I always came back to pure product related stuff with (as you can already imagine) A LOT of advertisers. I don't take any chances. If I see a lot of people bidding for each click, that's all I need to know. Of course, we're talking about sufficient levels of traffic, preferably higher priced stuff etc. I understand what you're saying, but it doesn't necessarily mean. For example, my conversion rate is usually between 10% - 20%. But I always send visitors to amazon via a single click. I use pure text links and sometimes "advanced links" (specific products with those little images and stuff) to complement the content. I had some sites that converted really well and they were done with associate-o-matic.com Needless to say, I never expected them to make any sales (duplicate content - lack of traffic) but since they were domains with PR, they did get their traffic increased exponentially due to their large number of indexed pages and they did attract laser targeted traffic of all kinds (niches) and they did and still do convert in the 30% - 40% range. That being said, you can see how even laser targeted traffic (brand name, model etc.) isn't converting completely. Your (and mine) traffic is targeted but at a lower level (group of products). Even the most targeted traffic doesn't convert as good as you would think. I'd really love if amazon would extend the 24 hour time frame into something like a week or two at least. The last affiliate to send you over there wins type of stuff. That's how hostgator's affiliate program works for example. True. Some products just don't get sold online as much as others. Congratulations! I knew you were going to say this. "Totally unrelated". That's pretty normal. Like I said, there's really no rules with amazon. That's why I always look to just send people with their credit cards in their hands over at amazon and then let amazon do what it does best. Sell stuff. Yesterday I was building links for a group of new websites that I am launching these days and I noticed that the standard "link to this page" thing is not working correctly. True, I was pushing it a little (link to a page with search terms applied - no department whatsoever) but it always worked in the past. I was pissed since I thought there's no way for me to keep doing the usual stuff and would have to link to a single department instead. What I tried is their "link to any page" option within the associates area. It works. At least for these literally "link to any page" types of links that I am using the most. But since, unlike me, you are building links to specific products, there shouldn't be any issues.
Thank you again Aleksandar. So, I guess that what it comes down to is that my traffic is simply not converting well? Here are some stats: The site receives an average of 175 unique visitors per day. I used to have adsense on the site, and it earned about $10-$15 per month. I thought that the earnings were fine, but I couldn't stop thinking that switching it to a site that would actually sell products instead of simply using Adsense ads would do SO MUCH better. And so I did. The way I have set it up (imagine an e-commerce store with the only different being that instead of "Add to cart", the buy link says "Buy from Amazon), I have managed to send about 10% of my traffic to amazon. That's an average of 15 unique visitors to amazon per day. At the moment (excluding the book sales) I have had it up and running for about 10 days and have made 0 sales and obviously $0. Furthermore, in the month of September, I have sent 103 unique visitors to amazon, most of which came through a link that said "Buy from Amazon", none of them actually bought a product. I am guessing that this is the case, but I would never, not even in my most pessimistic guesses, have guessed that the conversion would be that bad. I almost want to try and test how the site would work as an actual e-commerce site, because it feels as if Amazon is "turning off" my visitors. They seem to be taking all the right steps from my site, and then, as soon as they get to Amazon, they disappear. Do you think that if I was actually selling those products from my site I would have the same results? 0 sales? I am obviously not going to claim that my site is designed better than Amazon, but maybe the fact that they go from one site to a different one makes people think that they are "being tricked" or something... Any ideas?
Do you have google analytics installed? I doubt that amazon is "turning them off" and I agree with you when you say that you doubt that your site is better than amazon's since amazon invested millions of dollars into optimizing the whole thing. If you do not use google analytics (or anything in it's class at least), my best guess would be that the traffic is not really as good as you think. Seriously, $10 - $15 per month with those stats is extremely low. One of my sites with adsense earns about $10 per day with approx. half of your UV's daily.
Honestly it might not have anything to do with "you" at all. The economy is so bad right now that a lot of people are fantasizing about their next purchase but not actually making those purchases, for fear they won't have money left over for rent and food. If your clicks are rising, the sales will eventually come through.
Last month I had only 1% conversion rate on one of my home appliances' amazon sites. So maybe it is the case that people do not buy non-must-have products nowadays trying to save money. How know for sure... I think the only solution is to increase your traffic and make it targeted as much as possible .
I believe that 70 clicks is not enough to make a judgement whether you're on target or not. When you have 200-300 clicks you can start to see whether your site converts the traffic satisfactory - which probably would be above 1%, but don't stop there - don't get satisfied with that, keep testing and tweaking until you increase your conversions, once the traffic is flowing to your site.
I think all the detail you're giving here in this thread is evidence that you're doing all the right things and on track for success. I agree that 70 clicks isn't that much, and I'd just give it a little more time. I also think your assumption about the desk niche might be correct. A high percentage of people might go online to find reviews, top models and specifications but I feel like many would want to go to a store and see how it looks and feel the craftsmanship before purchasing. Even if they click the "buy it now" link, they might still be in browsing mode, since they know Amazon will provide more information. If you give it some more time and still see few sales, then it's possible that the site is better suited for Adsense. But please do keep us updated. Oh, by the way, I made my first Amazon commission about a month ago. The item? A completely unrelated ebook! That goes to show that the more you can just send people to Amazon, the better you'll do. They invest so much money in optimizing their site optimized for maximum sales. If only the cookie were a little longer!