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Many affiliates “hit the glass ceiling” when conversion rates from their existing audience plateau. Instead of trying to optimize their campaigns to increase conversions, they try to drive new traffic, which is a harder task that carries customer acquisition costs, giving them quite the headache. In this article, we’ll show you how to increase conversions on your affiliate campaign. Through alternatives to your CPA source, tracking options, landing page optimization tricks, automation, video advertising and retargeting, you will learn new and innovative ways as well as actionable steps to drive your conversion rates through the roof.

Step Away from Google AdWords

If you’ve maxed out your audience on Google AdWords, your CPA cost might start falling. In such a scenario, looking for an alternative to AdWords is a classic. We would recommend going with Facebook since it has the largest reach, a cornucopia of targeting options and an easy to set up and manage a budget. On the flip side, conversions aren’t as high as some other platforms, and you will constantly need to monitor the ad platform.

Besides Facebook, we would also recommend LinkedIn if you are looking to target specific audiences. Just like Facebook, it will need more attention and will likely be very costly to run successfully. Check out this post for more options. We would also propose supplementing your campaigns with the addition of an ad network. They’re usually flexible, offer a myriad of options from budgeting to targeting, and usually have quite a broad reach. Check out CPM ad network SelfAdvertiser for all of these advantages and more.

Are You Using the Right Affiliate Tracking Platforms?

Times change, and with them the tools every pro affiliate uses. Here are the features every affiliate pro’s tracking platform should have in 2017:

• Complete Measurability: You need front to backtracking of all programs as well as all the tools necessary to create, run and optimize on the go.
• Campaign and Step Tracking: Want to captivate the right audience? Then these tools that allow you to rotate and test each of your landing pages will be imperative. Know how your keywords, landing pages, referrals, and other elements are doing in real-time.
• Traffic Source Tracking: All-encompassing data means having data from all of your sources. This enables you to focus on traffic that you actually need and to optimize your strategy.
• Offer Rotation: More converting traffic means analyzing your best offer. This can be done if you serve more of what you have to more customers. Offer rotation is a must in today’s dynamic ad world.
• Conversion Tracking: In order to make decisions that are based on data, you will have to know what each click on your site means, how your commission sales are doing and which referrals are bringing you quality traffic.
• Easy Integration: Perhaps the most important and basic functionality is ease of use and integration with a wide variety of platforms and ad networks.

Did You Stop Optimizing Your Landing Page?

One of the best ways to optimize your landing page and see what works is to analyze your competition. Go through your 2-3 competitors and analyze their landing pages. Feel free to take some examples from them and split test to see if what they’re doing can work for you as well. This is a great tool that can help you analyze your competition.

Try and make your landing page look familiar to users. How do you do that? Well, look at the design of pages that users use on a daily basis and take hints from them (Facebook, Google, Youtube, etc.). Keeping the flow of your design the same is also crucial. If you have a brown theme and a red banner, it will be a disconnect to the user. Your landing page must match what the user is looking for.

Are You Using Retargeting?

When a visitor comes to your site, a small piece of code will drop a browsing cookie onto the user. This will later tell the provider when to serve ads. This means that you will retarget visitors that have been on your site in the past. What you want to do is choose which paid sources you will use for retargeting. We would suggest going with the common ones like Google AdWords, Facebook ads, and Twitter. On all of these platforms, you will need to create an audience list which will help you target the ad correctly. For more on this, go here. A final word of caution – make sure you set up conversion filtering and frequency capping to keep your costs low.

Are You Using Video? If Not, Now’s the Time

With video being on the verge of taking over most of the content consumption online, we look at some tips on how to utilize video advertising to increase conversions for affiliate campaigns:

• In-Stream Video Advertising: Displaying ad content before, during or after the video gives you a great advantage when you target your audiences who are searching for a video to solve their needs. As per Google, pre-video ads of 15-30 seconds long get the best conversion. Keep the message succinct and try not to interrupt your users too much.
• Display Video Advertising: Displaying your video content within banner ads and text links on sites that are trusted by your audience will let you piggyback on their authority. Additionally, it will help you build trust with the audience and drive conversion rates up. Make sure you align your video content to the user interests and websites in order to reap the benefits
• Social Video Advertising: These types of videos are well embedded and more easily sharable. Make your thumbnails compelling and the content tailored to user interests.

Automation is the Future. Automate as Much as You Can

Media buyers spend a lot of time tweaking campaigns, following data and playing with the parameters. It is a laborious and time-consuming task. This is where API comes in. New developments in this segment have enabled automation in the fullest sense of the word.

Tools like CPAPI help automate processes and make you the fastest, smartest and most up-to-date company. Wasting time on manual tasks and ditching automation is simply no longer an option.

Conclusion

Earning more from your affiliate campaign doesn’t necessarily mean you have to drive new traffic. There’s always room to increase conversions from your current audience. Essentially, if you’re looking at a glass ceiling, it’s time to break it. Use the above-mentioned techniques, and with these small tweaks, you can ensure that your conversion rates go through the roof and break the ceiling that we all naturally reach in our campaigns.