I'm an affiliate for an online retailer who runs their own affiliate program. I've had friends order through the banner on the site in order to earn me comission, yet the figures never add up in the back end when I log in to their affiliate control panel. My site gets between 500 and 1000 hits per day, but only seems to be earning me between £20 and £40 a month. That's a pretty bigass banner, so there must be a lot of click throughs. I also rank 1st in Google for the primary search term. I dunno, the numbers just don't seem to add up. Although it doesn't help that the approval of payments is sporadic and their affiliate system crashes once a month.
"I've had friends order through the banner on the site… That's a pretty bigass banner, so there must be a lot of click throughs." People are banner blind so banners typically do not get good click through rates. "My site gets between 500 and 1000 hits per day, but only seems to be earning me between £20 and £40 a month." The number that matters is not how many hits you get to YOUR site, but how many clicks you get to the merchant site. You could get tons of visitors but if the traffic is not well targeted or the product is not relevant or the ad placement is bad or it's a banner ad that people avoid - all these things can affect click through rates. Do you know how many clicks a month your affiliate banner is getting? Also it could be that the merchant site does not convert well, has leaks or has tracking problems, which it sounds like it might. Have you talked to the merchant about this?
You should try running the same type of Merchant offer from a different Affiliate Network to see if it converts better for you. Also changing the banner or offer weekly may help that ad space convert better. If you are getting a lot of the same traffic and no one clicked the banner the first time around, It will be less each week. Mix it up a bit. Let us know your results....
Unfortunately they are the only affiliate scheme in my niche. Otherwise I'd definitely go with someone else! I have spoken to the merchant twice about their system. Apparently it's going to be improved and commission paid for subscribers to their newsletters and stuff. God knows how they're doing that, but they seem to be doing a big community type project. The deadline for all this? No idea. Yes, it's a huge banner, but that's what increased the click through and commission rates early on. Very few people seemed to click on text links, although I could try including more contextual links in future articles and see what happens. Space Wolves (which my blog is about) are re-released next weekend, so traffic and clicks have been better. This is why I want to squeeze all the sales out of it that I can in the next couple of weeks.
A good tracking program and Awestats, but have a word with the client first before making too many assumptions. A lot of clicks and unqualified traffic is possible.
Well, there's nowhere else to go anyway and advertising on blogs is unheard of in my niche. So I just have to ride it out until they implement their new system.
Before signing any affiliate program you have to review that program, analyze merchants authenticity, geniality, transparency, convertibility even more how affiliate review site rate them even you can check their performances on various forum discussion.