Affiliate marketing is an increasingly important channel for Australian businesses, with 68% saying they will be increasing their marketing spend this year. That’s good news for the affiliate sites – or at least, for the ones that are on top of their game. Inevitably, affiliates will be facing more competition for those dollars, and the ones that have been sitting on their hands assuming the money will just come rolling in forever are in for a rude awakening.
Here, we will not go into the minutae of how to get started in affiliate marketing. We will assume you already have your niche, your website, your social feeds and even your PPC up and running. What we will be focusing on is the fine tuning that can make all the difference between a mediocre affiliate site and one that punches above its weight.
iGaming – the toughest affiliate niche of all?
We will draw a couple of examples from one of the toughest niches. The online casino business is booming like never before, and the number of Australian visitors to online casino sites increased by 50 percent between 2020 and 2021. Most of these new visitors used affiliates like Casino Aus (casinoaus.net/real-money-casinos/) to find their first online casino and get their fix of pokies, roulette and blackjack in cyberspace. The casino affiliate space was – and still is – incredibly competitive. Here’s what they do to find that extra two percent.
Create a funnel
It might sound a little condescending, but sometimes the truth hurts: Even grown adults need to be led by the hand like 2nd-graders sometimes. A sales funnel guides a visitor to your site and takes him or her through the process of learning about the different options making a choice, completing a purchase and, when the time is right, coming back for more.
We won’t go into all the detail here, there are dozens of resources out there with brightly colored charts and arrows by the boatload – Affilimate have a nice one on their blog at affilimate.com/blog/affiliate-marketing-funnel/. The important point is to make sure you have no gaps. Sometimes, something as seemingly mundane as a big call to action saying “BUY IT NOW” is the difference between closing a sale and losing a fish off the hook at the last moment. In our example, an affiliate might give comprehensive details about different casinos, but it needs to then show them how to take the next step – which might be to visit the casino or register details.
Information is everything
Information is the most important yet the most overlooked aspect of UX. For example, someone visits a casino affiliate site because they want as much information about different casino options as possible. That raw information needs to be there, and it needs to be obvious.
Casino Aus achieves this to good effect in the example we gave earlier. Key information about each casino is listed in tabular form in the middle of the page. And to return to our previous point for a moment, every one of them has a huge, obvious call to action right next to it, too.
Use landing pages wisely
There is some controversy over landing pages. Some people say they are essential for online sales, others contend that they are a waste of space. No less an authority than Neil Patel says they are a waste of space and then goes to some lengths explaining how they can boost online sales. It’s a tricky topic and we can only scratch the surface here.
The main point is to keep an open mind. LeadBit gives some useful insights on how casino affiliates can use A/B testing to see how effective landing pages are for guiding visitors through that all-important sales funnel – see how we keep coming back to it?
Focus your testing on mobile
Mobile adoption continues apace, and even over the past couple of years, the scales have continued to shift. More than 60 percent of internet traffic now comes from mobile devices. In the case of casino traffic, it is closer to 70 percent. Yet still, when testing our sites and going through all the checks that the SEO and digital marketing experts recommend, we tend to do so sitting in front of a desktop and from a PC-perspective. That’s fine as a way of analyzing numbers, but there’s nothing like seeing things from the buyer’s perspective.
Access your page from a mobile device, and make sure you are on a cell network, not your home WiFi. Critically assess what you see. Focus in particular on whether CTAs are clear and buttons work properly, in both portrait and landscape. Also pay close attention to page loading times. These might be acceptable on a PC but drop off when opening pages on mobile. There are numerous alarming statistics about loading time, but we will leave you with these two to ponder. Two thirds of online consumers say the main reason they would abandon a purchase is slow page loading. 40 percent will abandon the page if they have to wait three seconds or longer.
