More traffic equals more conversions, right? Wrong. And that’s the reason why you’re probably reading this. One of the biggest dilemmas you can face as a marketer is having vast amounts of traffic and yet, low volume of conversions.
Your traffic’s conversion rate can vary according to a large number of factors, so today we’ll see how we can analyze traffic to discover why it isn’t converting.
What you'll get from this post:
Just like a retailer can’t charge everyone that enters his shop, our earnings aren't guaranteed by the number of visitors. The retailer needs to turn those potential clients into buyers, as much as we need to set clicks into conversions.
In the mobile marketing industry, traffic comes from different sources such as ad networks, media buyers, agencies, webmasters, Facebookers.
It’s essential to determine if the traffic that you are sending comes from a reliable and relevant source or not. Ask yourself these five questions:
1- Is it a source that has traffic with a high-performance rate? It's a good indicator of the visitors’ interest in the offers.
2- Is it a direct source?
3- Do they send you “real” clicks?
4- Is it remnant traffic?
To have good quality traffic, you have to understand your sources first. Explore the background of the primary source, see which verticals/products/geos were profitable back then.
For example, a lot of affiliates incorporate backlinks on their smart links, which can be a good strategy, but you must make sure that the links are well placed. If you don't, the traffic that you get from them probably won't be seeking the type of content where you send it. In other words, it won’t be qualified, and the performance will decrease.
5 - Does the traffic match the offers?
One of the things that cause your traffic not to convert is the fact that it doesn’t match the offers where it's being sent. When this happens, you’ll notice a significant decrease in the eCPM, which means that the performance rate is decreasing.
Keep in mind that there are also some external factors that might affect the performance of some campaigns. Luckily, there are a few things you can ask yourself to make sure you’re going to make profitable choices. The first one is to make sure the offer is compelling. An attractive offer content will ensure visitors attention.
Secondly, question yourself about the right target because some verticals require a rigorous targeting. For example, if an offer is meant to convert in a specific carrier, and you’re sending Wi-Fi traffic, you will probably have a bad performance because you’ll be sending to the wrong segment.
Thirdly, are you following the restrictions? Advertisers often use restrictions on how an offer can promote. The primary concerns are the type of traffic, promotional methods, and time-targeting. If they aren't followed, they might lead to bad performance.
Keep in mind that a lot of advertisers can provide even more valuable information. For example, if you’ve been running an offer for the last three days they can analyze where it's more profitable (which carrier and operating system) and, if possible, tell you the best promotional method, such as pop-unders, banners.
Hidden Causes and general pieces of advice
At first sight, it seems like the only limitations we’ll encounter are evident, but sometimes factors (that we take for granted) happen to fail. Amongst these are global caps, tech issues, unfired or retention of conversions, adulteration of the offers. Pay attention to abrupt breakdowns of performance, do some A/B tests and use some tools to check the details.
Don't forget to test, test, test!
Once you’ve qualified your traffic and have chosen your promoting verticals with some potentially good offers, it’s time to test the campaigns you’re going to run. The most important thing is the consistency of your actual test. It's like solving an equation. You need to be sure that some parameters are constants if you want to find the solution.
When we know that an offer is converting well the best thing to do is to test multiple traffic sources. Also, it’s essential to have statistic relevancy with enough information before making an assumption.
Even if your offers are geo-targeted, the traffic is qualified, and you’re following all the restrictions and recommendations, we’ll always have to deal with the traffic volume. Every offer works differently, so don’t be startled about not having a conversion after 100 clicks. Nowadays, it’s getting harder to get conversions after just a few clicks due to the substantial amount of content out there.
Besides, the conversion rate varies a lot, so make sure you know the market. In some countries, users seek more premium content so the CR might be lower due to the visitors’ particular character, but, in general, payouts are higher.
Last but not least, take into consideration asking your account manager for advice! Both of you are working towards the same direction, so it makes total sense to communicate and have an active role. Besides, account managers are aware of your actions, and if you missed any significant detail in your analysis, they might find it.
Above all, never stop questioning your approach. An excellent affiliate doesn’t settle when achieving good results; they strive for even higher ones!
Posted by @sofia at January 18, 2018