There’s a major source of untapped traffic that most affiliates consider to be impossible to tap in due to the costs involved.
The title of the article gave it away, so here’s why adwords traffic can actually be profitable for affiliate sites:
Most companies running adwords campaigns are e-commerce businesses, targeting “purchase” keywords. For “best” and “review” types there is very low competition.
Coupled with the fact that there are high-converting, high-paying affiliate offers available, mostly outside of amazon, this means that if you test enough, you can actually find profitable keywords to run adwords campaigns on.
This is a strategy that we’ve used to add an extra few hundred $$ in our portfolio of websites, and today we will show you how to implement.
The TL;DR version is this:
Calculate how much you earn by visitor for a certain page. If it is > 0.10$, run an adwords campaign with a target conversion cost of 0.1$, with the conversion being a click to the affiliate site.
It’s a simple as that. 0.1$ actions are achievable, and I’ve had pages where each user was worth 0.25$+.
Step 1- Track Clicks to Affiliate Pages
For this step, you’ll have to install google tag manager.
Add the GTM code to your header, then head over to their website.
Once there, create a new tag, link google analytics in the “tag configuration” tab, and a trigger.
The trigger should be set as follows:
- Trigger type: “Click- all elements”
- This trigger fires on: “Some clicks”
- Fire this trigger when an Event occurs and all of these conditions are true: “Click url contains amz.to” (if you’re using shortlinks, if you are using full links, put “amazon.com”, if you are using another affiliate program, put in that url)
You tag should now be ready. Make sure that the trigger is correctly defined and google analytics events are also link.
Click “submit” and head over to your website.
Using the google tag manager extension, check if the analytics event is being fired when you click on an affiliate link.
You now have the total number of clicks to affiliate programs per page.
Step 2- Track conversion on Affiliate Program
Now, for this step, you’ll be relying on your affiliate program’s reporting.
Most affiliate program automatically calculate earnings per click, if they don’t, simply take the total revenue and divide by the total of click events during that period.
You now have the revenue per click to affiliate pages.
Step 3- Track users per page
Now, head over to google analytics, click on “behaviour”->”site content” and download the traffic data per page.
Step 4- Estimate earnings per user per page
Now for each page, multiply the number of clicks to affiliate pages (step 1 results) by the earnings per user (step 2 results) and divide the results by the total number of visitors to that page (step 3)
You now have a rough estimation of earnings per user per page that you can use to set max bids on adwords.
Don’t forget that all data from steps must be analysed in the same time frame.
Also, this isn’t a perfect measure, to make it better, create 1 affiliate id or sub-id per page, that way, you’ll get a more precise step 2 number, as different pages should have different conversion rates on the affiliate partner site