Amazon affiliate: crap results

Hi guys, just wanted to see if anyone could give me some advice here. About 6 months back I put up a blog site really just intended for SEO purposes. It?s just a blog about celebrity wealth with articles I have bought from some good content writers.

However, for the last few months the site has averaged around 250k ? 350k page views per month. Not a lot, I know, but much more than I ever anticipated. So I thought I might as well try to make a few bucks on it since it was sitting there with no ads on or anything. After reading a few guys here on BHW being very positive towards Amazon, I thought I?d try to give it a go.

On pages where a link to a movie or film made sense, I manually added some product links (eg. on a post related to the Storage Wars series I added a link to the three series available on DVD etc). Then I also put up one of Amazons automated product suggestion things on all pages for the entire blog.

This sort of mini project is no something I would normally bother to do, but people on BHW was talking about conversion rates from 10 ? 25% so I thought it be worth my time.

Now, in the first 10 days, I have had an average of 800 or so clicks on those links. So basically about 8000 people have gone from my site to Amazon?s product page. Of which I have gotten 7, yup s-e-v-e-n, sales. WTF is going on? I could have been selling plastic knives at $25 a piece on the site and gotten a better conversion rate than that?!

Anyone who can shed some light on this? Is Amazon just retarded?

the answer to this is simple

targeted niche sites convert at 10-20%
autoblog type sites convert at 2-3%
non targeted sites are going to convert less than 1%

people are not going to your site looking to buy something.

If you want to have people buy from your site - make a site where they would be looking for that type of information... which leads to a purchase.

First, what countries does your traffic come from?

Second, it is SEO traffic or social traffic?

Assming that your traffic is US based and from search engines, I'd make a sidebar ad instead of in context links. I'd make it something that your visitors would want to click on - like "Star x's favorite luxury thong" or "the rims that Star z always puts on his new cars" and link it to some appropriate Amazon page. You'll get a good CTR but you won't be getting 10+% conversions. You're conversions will be relatively low because of the nature of your site. But you'll still make money because of high traffic levels and the fact that everybody buys stuff from Amazon, assuming you have US traffic.

If people are not going to your site to buy and they are looking for info to read then your conversion will always be low. You can still think of some great ways to convert like you mentioned. If you have a section on storage wars then have a scrolling carousel widget with all of the storage type DVD for sale and the same for other shows on TV etc. Keep thinking of new ways to convert. Put yourself in the visitors mind, if you were surfing the web and came across your page what would want to make you buy something?

LBrown said:

First, what countries does your traffic come from?

Second, it is SEO traffic or social traffic?

Click to expand...

Thanks to all you guys for the feedback.

The site got about 70% US traffic, 10% UK traffic. It is 95% from search engines.

As you guys rightly point out, people are not coming to the site to buy. So I wasn't expecting a high CTR. What surprised me was the low conversion rate on people who actually click on the ads. If you first bother to click on a box that says "Click here to buy Season 1 of Storage Wars" I'd have expected a little more than 1 out of 1000 actually buying the crap. Maybe people are just weird.

Making money on this site wasn't important to me at all - I have other projects that are making good money. However, when I first bothered to sit down and actually spend time on signing up with Amazon and implementing these ads it was a little bit irritating not getting any return on it. And as a matter of silly pride I now want to make sure I can get the site to generate at least a little bit of money.

Do you guys think, given the type of site, I'd be better off dropping Amazon altogether and go with f ex Adwords ads?

And once again, people don't use logic and think traffic is some sort of math formula which will always work the same way...

Honestly, if you talk about fishes and then sell car wires you won't barely make a sale...

Basic marketing is simple logic, use your brain and put yourself on your customer's shoes...

Reyone said:

And once again, people don't use logic and think traffic is some sort of math formula which will always work the same way...

Honestly, if you talk about fishes and then sell car wires you won't barely make a sale...

Basic marketing is simple logic, use your brain and put yourself on your customer's shoes...

Click to expand...

No need to be rude. As I said the site was never intended for making money, and I just wanted to test this out. When it didn't work I asked for some suggestions from fellow BHW members.

No need to teach me about basic marketing - I own some very successful companies. I was basically just trying to understand, not why the CTR is low, but why the conversion rate of people actually clicking on the ad and being brought to Amazon's product page is 7/8000. That is less than 0.1% and I don't think your, although very helpful, answer fully explains this.

PS! Tried to make the "thanks" button work to give you your well earned credit, but I must have JS turned off...

You have to think about the mindset of the people going to your site. Are they going to your site because they are already ready to buy a product but just want some reviews or someone to back up their choice of buying a product? If that is the case, sites will convert very well. However, if they are visiting the site for other reasons, you will have much much lower conversions.

By the way, that is some very nice traffic, you should be able to monetize it in other ways. Perhaps start getting an opt in list.

Already posted but not targeted... The way to convert non targeted readers into buyers (especially in entertainment) is to cover something that celeb has had success with.

For instance "Jamie Foxx's secret supplement to get ripped for the move Django" and the article talks about his routine and products he took and then a link to some of the products. Should convert better since now the reader has some emotional attachment (Wow I want to look like that, or I want to get ripped)

Obviously not all articles can be this type but you can sprinkle in products based on celeb endorsements and usage

Great answer

Danny1111 said:

the answer to this is simple

targeted niche sites convert at 10-20%
autoblog type sites convert at 2-3%
non targeted sites are going to convert less than 1%

people are not going to your site looking to buy something.

If you want to have people buy from your site - make a site where they would be looking for that type of information... which leads to a purchase.

Click to expand...

Remember also that Amazon cookie only lasts a day, so people may be going back and buying later so you dont get the commission. Maybe try an different affiliate with a longer cookie time and see if that helps. Although Amazon is a very trusted retailer, that is the benefit of using them.

sgcashcow said:

great. i need help in this too.

Click to expand...

With smashing up your phone? Only too glad to be of service. I can give you a postal address and then upload a video of the action. If it is an iPhone, I'll do it for free.

Hope this motivates you.



Haha. I never really been into amazon, but I just drop a few links here and there.

What I'd suggest you to do is keep on tweaking your pages, meaning ad placement, type of ad, images, colors, links etc.
Ask people around you that are not into IM what they think about your site.

Junkfood00 said:

Hope this motivates you (...)

Click to expand...

Haha! Definitely good to see it's not just me

Really under the circumstances I am beginning to wonder if I should just replace it with adsense ads and forget about the whole thing. The site continues to grow on its own and looks like it may break 500k pageviews this month. Would have been good to find a better way of monetizing on it than what will likely be around a mere $500 from Adsense, though.

Thanks to everyone having given feedback on this thread!

Here's mine

Here is my earnings from last month. Im sure I dont have nearly the volume that a lot of more experienced people have, but from my experience, when you have good results it requires you to market the products that you are selling, trying to convince people to buy it. This means that simply slapping your amazon banners up on your site will give you very poor results and my sites just have Adsense for the banner advertisements because of Amazon's banners' low conversion rates.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if your traffic is not primarily from the US, you will most likely be able to find higher paying alternatives unless you are very creative with all sorts of geo targeting, sending people to the Amazon site in their country... but I really dont know how this works. I got a 10% conversion rate as you can see, and about 1/4 of the people who visit my site click through to amazon so I have been very happy with my experience with Amazon's Affiliate program mixed with Adsense banners