Conversion rates are the heartbeat of affiliate marketing—they reveal how many people move from curious clicks to actual purchases, and they guide you in turning even more visitors into buyers.
Let’s get this out of the way: there’s no one-size-fits-all conversion rate for affiliate marketers. Every niche, every vertical, and even every campaign will have different results. The only thing that matters is your benchmark and how you improve on it.
That said, there’s been a lot of data collected from affiliate marketers and research companies, and we can use this to guide us on our affiliate marketing journey.
Read on to discover more about affiliate conversion rates and how you can improve yours.
Key takeaways:
- Strong affiliate marketing strategies and targeted affiliate marketing efforts help increase your affiliate marketing conversion rate over time.
- Understanding your target audience and refining your affiliate promotional efforts are essential for boosting affiliate sales.
- Tracking metrics such as the average affiliate conversion rate allows you to measure affiliate marketing success and improve future affiliate marketing campaigns.
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What is conversion rate?
Your goal as a marketer is to get people to “convert”: that is, to take the action you want them to take. This could be buying an item, clicking a link, giving you their email, signing up for a newsletter, or any other action that aligns with your business’s objectives.
Most platforms (including ThriveCart) give you conversion rates automatically, so you don’t have to work them out yourself. But if you want to calculate your own conversion rate, you can do this by taking the number of conversions and dividing it by the total number of visitors, then multiplying by 100 to express it as a percentage. Therefore, the formula is:
(Number of Conversions ÷ Number of Clicks) × 100
A higher conversion rate generally indicates that a higher percentage of visitors are taking the desired action, suggesting that your website or marketing campaign is effective in achieving its goals. Monitoring and optimizing conversion rates are essential for improving the overall performance and success of online businesses and marketing strategies.
Affiliate marketing conversion rate defined
This is the percentage of visitors who complete an affiliate-related action, like clicking an affiliate link, making a particular purchase, or signing up for an enticing offer.
In affiliate marketing, a conversion means any desired action that directly yields results to your promotion efforts, such as:
- A new email signup
- A product bought through an affiliate link
- A free trial activation
- A form submission
These actions portray the effectiveness of your affiliate marketing efforts with your target audience and how well your affiliate site brings them to complete the offer.
Formula
The affiliate marketing conversion rate means the percentage of the number of people who took action compared to the number of people who clicked or visited your page. It follows the same formula as the usual conversion rate calculation.
(Number of Conversions ÷ Number of Clicks) × 100
Improving it is the core of conversion rate optimization, which helps you:
- See which affiliate marketing strategies work best.
- Examine the performance of various affiliate marketing campaigns.
- Understand how your promos resonate with users across affiliate networks.
- Enhance conversion rates by testing offers, landing pages, and design features.
Refining your affiliate promotional efforts gives you a better chance of boosting affiliate sales that can lead to long-term affiliate marketing success.
Using Google Analytics to boost conversions
When you integrate analytics tools like Google Analytics into your checkout pages, you can get more detailed conversion rate insights.
By seeing where your traffic is coming from and how well it converts, you can segment your audience to deliver more powerful campaigns, conduct more accurate split testing (A/B testing) and more.
You can also use this tool to analyze the keywords users are searching for to get to your site. With this, you can better understand what users are looking for and optimize your site’s content accordingly.
What is a good conversion rate for affiliate marketing?
Like we said earlier, it’s impossible to get a true average conversion rate for affiliate marketing, as every affiliate program, product, and marketing campaign is different.
The best strategy is to start out and establish your own benchmark, then try to optimize it as much as possible in order to improve on those numbers.
As a general guideline, conversion rates for affiliate marketing may seem quite low. Conversion rates of 0.5% to 1% are considered average: this is because affiliate marketing is highly competitive, and it can be difficult to be seen.
However, if you’re a big name in a low-competition niche, for example, these numbers may be wildly different. The only way to find out is to try it for yourself!
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Strategies to boost affiliate conversion rate
Want to boost your conversions? Of course you do! If you’re an affiliate marketer, follow these six steps to give your conversion rate a boost:
1) Collaborate with other influential affiliates
Partner with influencers in your niche who can create compelling content and have a trustworthy readership, focusing on audience engagement rather than sheer size. Go with affiliates who hold sway within your industry and can craft persuasive content that drives sales, and have a dedicated audience that places trust in them. Leveraging their impact through the promotion of your product or service can contribute to a noticeable uptick in your conversion rates.
2) Utilize coupons and promotions
Offer deals to appeal to potential buyers, leveraging coupon and deal sites to drive revenue and attract online shoppers. Everyone loves a good deal, and online buyers will often search for coupons and bargains before going directly to the vendor. This is your time to shine, as offering coupons or deals can really boost your marketing efforts.
3) Implement effective calls to action
Guide your audience through the buying process by incorporating clear and varied calls to action (CTAs) in blog content and landing pages. High-intent phrases like “Buy Now” and “Get Your Download” are surprisingly effective in driving improved conversion rates, so if your numbers look a bit lackluster, consider changing up your choice of words.
4) Optimize landing pages
Regularly test and optimize landing pages, making small changes to gauge their impact on conversion rates. With ThriveCart, you can easily split test your checkout pages, allowing you to make the changes that really matter.
5) Incorporate social proof
Include online reviews, testimonials, case studies, and real-world results to build trust and tap into the social proof phenomenon. On ThriveCart, you can add images and badges to your pages that inspire trust in even the most skeptical of buyers, allowing you to showcase what sets you apart from the crowd.
6) Assess traffic quality
Ensure that the quality of your website traffic aligns with your target demographic, collaborating with affiliates who cater to your niche audience. Google Analytics helps you do this with the power of data, collecting actionable insights to drive better conversion rates.
Use ThriveCart for better affiliate marketing conversion rates
If you’re a vendor with a product and you want to recruit affiliates to boost your sales, there’s no better platform to use than ThriveCart.
You can set up digital products, online courses, and more, with an affiliate management program that lets you add swipe copy and manually control commission rates to reward your highest-performing affiliates. With ThriveCart, it’s easy to get data-driven insights to boost conversion rates and help your affiliates sell as much as possible.
Interested? Try out ThriveCart today.
