Wow, I just learned one of the most valuable lessons in improving the conversion rate of clickthroughs to affiliate sites.
Stumbling Upon Traffic
It all started when I started getting traffic for the “Hercules Hook” for a simple paid post that I did. I figured that there may be some money to be made so I updated my copy and got a little traffic and some conversions rolling in.
After a week or 2 the traffic tapered off as other competitors upped their copy and pushed my down the natural search results.
Then I found a service called hittail.com which gives you suggestions for long tail search phrases that you should write copy for. I took the information that it had which said that I was getting hits for “Hercules Hooks” with an s and that I should try “Hercules Hook” without.
Increase in Traffic
I tried it and was impressed – I was getting more traffic. The traffic was from the fact that I was on the first page again for both phrases – cool.
The issue was that I was not getting very may clickthroughs and hardly and sales. I figured that this had to be from the fact that the page was all text and did not have a picture of the product. Therefore I added a picture of the product with a link to my affiliate. I made sure that the image was above the fold to try and maximize clickthroughs.
Sure enough my clickthroughs went up – a lot.
No Increase in Conversions
The only issue was that I was not getting any sales from my new clicks. I considered looking for a different affiliate and did some searching. But then I decided to look at their landing page to see it was really their fault that I was not converting.
When I clicked the link it stalled, and never made it through to their site – user error. See I had a script called Lightbox that makes nice little layered pop-ups for images. For some reason this script was trying to do the same thing to my link even though there wasn’t a link to a larger image.
Fixing the Problem
A quick adjustment to the link to remove the script functionality and my link was going to where it was supposed to go.
I have a really good feeling that I should see some better conversions immediately as people will actually be able to order the product 😉 .
Conclusion
A lot of the time we are trying to look at the big issues why we are not getting conversions when it can just be a little issue that is causing the loss of sales.
P.S. Here is the page in question – Hercules Hook.