Cookie Is King (Not Content) : Part 1
posted in Affiliate Marketing |
Depending on which angle you approach the discussion & the question. What is king? Is content king or is cookie king? As part one of however many I end up blogging about. Let’s look at “The Cookie Is King”, for some this maybe sucking eggs but through our own trial and error over sustained periods of time, this s what has worked for us, in our KISS approach (Keep It Simple Silly).
Can I firstly say, I am not condemning the discussion or subjective opinions of what actually is content, but consider this momentarily, how a ppc ad of less than 100 characters can trigger & yield as many if not more sales than a full page of content.
When you visit various sites displaying products, the most common button you see is “Buy Now”. The problem is with button appearing alone, there is an over assertive (aggressive) assumption as to presuming what stage the customer is during the purchasing journey. This command alone will probably not yield a massively high click through rate, you could argue that conversion is good if your pre-sell as well (just one type of content, which we will come onto again), but if that person is not ready to buy now, there is more likelihood that the “Buy Now” button is not clicked & thus no cookie dropped, so what’s happened, your content (varying in degree & subjective in discussion & opinion to what is quality or effective) may have the bells & whistles or not, but realistically in most cases your site won’t necessarily be remembered if & when they are ready to purchase.
The next most common button used (though not used often enough) is “More Info”, again it can be suggested that you should only provide the potential customer just a taster of the product, if you provide them with too much information on your web site then there is less likelihood this button is pressed, thus less cookies are dropped. Very often when linking to a merchant web site or better still deep linking to a product, that consumer is presented with more or less the same information … again … the customer is being pre sold to what amounts to the same content twice, why? It’s a shame that still 10 years or so into affiliate marketing, the item cannot be put into the basket on the merchant site on following a link from an affiliate site, surely this could increase conversions.
From our own tests by featuring both a “Buy Now” & “More Info” with less content the click thru rate (CTR) increased, thus so did sales, as it considered different stages of a customers journey. Appraoch this sales technique like a funnel effect, the wide part of the funnel represents a stage where a customer is less committed to purchasing a product.
Some of you are thinking, “hey Moose, your teaching me to suck eggs.” … Fair enough.
By the same token & taking this still further now introduce a “Check Stock” button, the consumer maybe at a stage where they are thinking, “I don’t want to buy quite yet let’s check to see if the item is in stock and I’ll come back later.” The consumer clicks, another cookie is dropped, remembering the consumer is more likely to return to the merchant’s site than your own if returning later, but at least the cookie is dropped & in place.
So far we have “Buy Now”, “More Info”, “Check Stock”. Again experiments have shown the CTR has increased and so have sales, which do you think had the highest conversion rate or yielded the most commission? It might not be that obvious.
However, there is one more option. You know there has been a lot of heated debate, discussion & policies related to voucher code & discount code sites in relation to “click to reveal code & visit merchant site” when there is not a valid code available. Well the last option, stemmed from the aforementioned & considers that it is not necessarily a necessity to display the price of a product. With the adoption of a “Show Price” button, taking the user to relevant merchant page also significantly increases CTR, cookie drops & sales.
With these four buttons : “Buy Now”, “More Info”, “Check Stock”, “Show Price” you are considering different elements of a customers journey. But sometimes users don’t always click on these buttons as they are and you really have to say exactly what is meant to do on the tin, by prefixing these with “Click Here”, thus we have “Click Here to Buy Now”, “Click Here for More Info”, “Click Here to Check If In Stock”, “Click Here to Show Price”.
Long winded you may think, it’s up to you to experiment for yourselves to draw your own conclusions. For us, it has been conclusive that CTR’s have been increased & so have sales by reducing information or content about any particular product simply because more cookies were dropped. It’s also worthwhile split testing with different colour buttons or fonts for each one as well as different placement orders to find the optimum setting for you.
There are several other small improvements which can be appended to this to tweak even more, but this blog entry is getting quite long now, and I’ll save it for another time.
If you can get the right blend of “content” & consideration of the different stages the consumer is on their purchasing journey, you should hopefully yield better commissions.
Until a mechanism is found to reward affiliates at various integral parts of a customers journey (where content could be king), also remembering the recent adoption of voucher code “click to reveal “policies introduced via some networks partly because of the cookie dropping … Unfortunately it’s not an ideal world & for sometime yet Cookie will be King.
