Twelve Days
of Christmas
DAY 8
With just over 4 weeks of Christmas shopping time left, by now you should have finalized the structure of your sites. However, with just a few tweaks you could increase your conversions. Shopping behaviour is completely different at this time of year, with users less search-driven and browsing more. Your site design needs to reflect this fundamental shift.
Here is a 5-point guide of how you can make the most of the wide array of graphical element types and formats available from key merchants during this period.
HELP YOUR USER TO BUY
At this time of year, users are buying for someone else. Seasonal banners might be cheesy, but add an extra call-to-action for the surfer to click. Banners for specific suggested products or known brands might help uncertain surfers.
Search banners are particularly powerful as they provide the user with a range of options, and they drive very strong conversion to sale.
Our relatively new AdTool technology has lots of content and we have created some great seasonal templates. Try to accommodate content units that display a range of products where appropriate within your structure. See part one of our newsletters for for more information on AdTool. There are plenty of advertisers who have created best selling content units, just in time for Christmas.
CHOOSE CREATIVES THAT SELL
Make sure you devote enough inventory to the kinds of products and brands that your users are buying at this time of year. Obvious strong sellers at this time year, such as CDs and DVDs, gadgets and mobile phones should be integrated, and be creative.
Also, where possible, use banners that deep link – that is to take the consumer as close to the point of sale as possible by sending a click to a particular landing page.
DON'T FORGET BASIC DESIGN PRINCIPLES
UPDATE REGULARLY
When you run your overview report you naturally check the number of unique visitors each advertiser has had, how many sales have been generated and how much revenue you have earned. For the purpose of this example lets assume you have:
- sent 5,000 UVS and generated £5,000 in commission for a specific advertiser....
The performance metric used in the affiliate marketing industry is known as Earnings Per Click [EPC]. This figure states, on average, how much each click you sent to an affiliated advertiser has earned you. In the above example it would be calculated by dividing commission by unique visitors, £5,000/5,000 = £1.00. Therefore each click that you sent to this advertiser has earned you £1.00 on average. Don't forget you can download your overview report in Excel and from there you can calculate the EPC for every single one of your advertisers with a simple formula.
Once you have calculated the EPC, sort by the highest EPC
At the top you will have the advertiser who has earned you the most per click (highest EPC). Spend a some time looking at the EPC figures, and you may find that an advertiser is performing extremely well but not getting as much traffic as a lower performing advertiser in the same category is. Again, if you find an advertiser is underperforming, have a look out some of the other advertisers in the same category on the TradeDoubler platform.
USE POOLS AND ADTOOL
You can use TradeDoubler's Pooling functionality to provide ad rotation within a single placement. You build up the pool with multiple banners of the same size and rotate based on criteria you specify and displayed in a given order. Pooling will allow you to use the same code for multiple graphical elements in one location (and deep linking is still possible within the pools).
The pools and AdTool can be set to automatically optimize themselves based on revenues earned.
SUMMARY
If you take into account these 5 keys to quality Christmas creative you will be well on your way to optimizing your Christmas campaign this year.
