Want Super Affiliates to Place Your Link on Homepage? Bad Goal

affiliate management clients with whom I speak see super affiliate recruitment as one of the principle objectives for their affiliate manager(s).

Furthermore, over 50% of them believe that the key to success is in having these newly-recruited super affiliates place the merchant’s banner(s) on the homepage of the super affiliate’s website.

Such simplistic approach can end up being a waste of money. After all, some affiliate will agree to place your links on their homepage for a placement fee (yes, on top of the commission), but who told you it will drive (the expected) “super” results?

The ultimate goal of every affiliate program is to drive incremental revenue.

The means of achieving this goal may not be the above-mentioned two (or (i) recruiting existing super affiliates, and (ii) getting them to place your link on the homepage of their website).

It is all about the quality of the link placement. And sometimes the homepage will not yield the results that you hope for, and/or what the super affiliate expects.

Instead of asking super affiliates for that homepage link, offer them a conversion-oriented idea of placing your link in front of the right eyeballs… After all, it is significantly more effective to get it in front of 100,000 targeted shoppers (where at 3% CTR and 5% conversion rate, 3,000 visitors will result 150 sales) than have it in rotation on the homepage — in hopes of getting it in front of 1 million viewers — but getting a 0.1% CTR (i.e. 1,000 clicks vs 3,000), lower conversion rate (than with targeted traffic), and lesser number of sales. In the latter case, we were never able to register conversion higher than 1.5%-2%. So your math will look as follows:

• Targeted page: 100,000 views * 3% CTR * 5% conversion rate = 150 sales
• Homepage: 1,000,000 views * 0.1% CTR * 2% conversion = 20 sales

Of course, such important contingency as the affiliate’s specialization plays an important role. For instance, if you are selling shoes, and they specialize specifically on footwear too, a homepage link on their website will likely yield a higher CTR and higher conversion. However, a placement on page (or in a section) that caters specifically to your traffic (e.g. women, residing in contental US, ages 35 to 65, earning in excess of $100,000 annually) will always yield much better results.